Sun 13 Jun 2021
STEVEN FRIMMER – Dead Matter. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, hardcover, 1982. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 reprint edition.
The beginning writer is often admonished to “write what you know,” sometimes over and over again. Steven Frimmer is an editor at a New York publishing house, and he’s probably had occasion to give this same advice to a good many fledgling authors over the, years — and all of them more or less receptive, I’m sure!
But if it’s so, he certainly practices what he preaches, as he most capably demonstrates here.
This is Frimmer’s first venture into mystery fiction. Involved in this tale is a senior editor at a small New York publishing house (surprise!) and lots of dastardly doings in the world of books: in-fighting, back-stabbing, and love-making, plus a totally unexpected spy trip to Istanbul, courtesy of the CIA.
All the makings, in fact, of a truly funny and engaging little thriller.
Back in New York a murder is also committed, and a new detective emerges on the scene: British personality-host Hartley Dobbs — sort of a David Frost with an affinity for crime.
For those who pride themselves on their armchair detecting ability, too much of what happens is forced to take place offstage, and the reader is left to learn about it too late to do any good.
The fascinating world of editing and publishing offers more than mere background, however. Tied up and neatly integrated into both the crime and its solution is the psychology of the people who work with books — and the way they think. It’s a plus, and it’s nicely done.
Rating: B
Bibliographic Update: This was, alas, Steven Frimmer’s only venture into the world of detective fiction.
June 13th, 2021 at 8:33 pm
Interesting advice about writing what you know, because I am doing just that, writing a group of short stories concerning the same character at different stages of life, from the 1930’s as a detective in Boston through the 1970s in Canada. What I know about is the principal character, not at all like me, but exactly like me in attitude. We will wait and see how that works.
June 13th, 2021 at 8:52 pm
Ironically Hemingway, the supposed champion of writing from experience, once wrote in an unfinished Nick Adams story that “Nothing I ever wrote that I didn’t make up was ever any good.” Write what you know would have sidelined some of the greatest writers of all times if they followed the rule too strictly.
I’ve always preferred “Know what you write.”
Good luck though Barry, I would be interested to read the finished product, sounds ambitious.
This review reminds me that here and in the UK there is an entire sub genre of mysteries set against the background of publishing and radio and television dating back to the early days of the genre. I suppose it is because so many writers came from those backgrounds or had experience in them from Val Gielgud to Simon Brett.
June 13th, 2021 at 9:09 pm
David, I would love you to read it, but I have no time frame. It is ambitious for me, not for someone who has been working on a regular basis at this kind of thing. Also, I began writing attempting a straightforward mystery novel, with Cary Grant as the detective, in his Jimmy Monkley disguise. After one hundred or so pages, I gave it to my wife, who said: “Where is the rest of my story?” There was none, so I backtracked.
June 13th, 2021 at 10:50 pm
Hemingway’s career continues to generate massive debate in writing circles.
Myself, I applaud anyone who can adopt the straightforward trappings of their everyday life and convert them into a suspenseful narrative.
I feel this is not-at-all easy to do. Even when one possesses similar-seeming life-material which afford itself, ready-to-hand. I just don’t think it flows that way. It is a struggle to generate suspense from the mundane and the every day.
Hemingway, I feel sure, embellished what he had to, in order to make the rich material he experienced into ‘functional’ suspense. But he did enjoy a heckuva lot of raw content to transform. More than most of us can boast. Personalities, characters and events, peoples and settings and adventures galore.
Maybe his novels didn’t always work out that well. But his short stories are gems; and many of them have hardly any story at all. They’re poetic; finely-hewn. Said by many to be his forte’. Testament to his craft which (I feel) no amount of copycatting or analysis has ever denigrated.
I find Hemingway encouraging rather than limiting. I won’t quibble whether everything always happened exactly the way he resolved that it did, but I always trust his matter-of-fact descriptions of fish and trees and men which resides within his stories.
I think any regular visitor to this astute, informative website has huge potential as an author and I wish everyone well in their endeavor.
June 14th, 2021 at 7:36 pm
I think most writers who write from experience would also admit a lot of invention goes with it. Ian Fleming based most of his books on actual wartime plots transposed to the Cold War, but he dressed them up with sex, sadism, and even a touch of SF and added glamor and telegraphing events into thriller form.
Something like Hemingway’s “Francis Macomber” wasn’t fully based on observation alone, merely on his experience of white hunters, customers, Africa, and what could happen, as well as a few stories no doubt heard by the campfire over drinks.
Oddly the British policemen who wrote mystery fiction like Basil Thompson, Frank Froest, and others tended to write thrillers or Golden Age mystery and not police procedure.
June 14th, 2021 at 7:38 pm
If I can add on a thought:
what startles me about this author and his novel is that it seems so entirely out-of-touch with today’s …everyday realities.
Publishing –along with many other occult industries –decidedly possessed a special ‘mystique’. At least it did so, once. A very worthy setting for a detective or murder mystery.
Is it still that way today? I just can’t imagine the backdrop of this novel, in contemporary times, in times where no one has any ‘secrets’.
Today, I can’t imagine authors like this, who speak from some obscure world no one else is aware of. Isn’t every office worker on a …Microsoft Office Suite? Where is the mystery?
I’m making myself depressed as I write this. 🙁
June 14th, 2021 at 7:39 pm
Barry,
I’ve started a few stories that way and found despite a good opening there was no there there. I’m a bit more anal about novels and usually have worked everything out before I start.
You’re in good company with Cary Grant Chandler, Charteris, and Fleming each wanted him to play his character. No telling how many others did too.
June 14th, 2021 at 9:07 pm
David,
I solved some of my problems by turning the single-story into multiple adventures, not a novel, exactly, but four-character connected pieces. As for Cary Grant, like all the others, I became obsessed with him, or at least Jimmy Monkley, the character he played in Sylvia Scarlett, so I dealt with that by recasting or rethinking the part.