Geek Gab: On the Books and Stage Magic

Yesterday, I was privileged to join Brian Niemeier and Alfred from the Injustice Gamer on the Geek Gab On The Books livestream to talk about pulps, detective stories, and crime.



When the conversation turned to some of the more unique pulps, a connection was made between pulp writers and their hobby of stage magic, which both Brian and Jeffro Johnson of Castalia House found significant.

To support this connection, let me reprint the comments I left on the Castalia House article:

Will Murray pointed out the connection in his introduction to the reissues of the Diamondstone stories:

“FOR some unexplained reason, magic fascinated the pulp writers of the 1930s and ’40s.

“The king of them all was Walter B. Gibson, who created The Shadow out of a mesmerizing radio voice and his close association with Blackstone, Thurston, Houdini, Dunninger and other notable magicians. Gibson was as famous for his books on stage magic as he was for his prolific pulp output. He knew all the tricks, from Hypnotism to escape stunts, and employed them freely in spinning his Shadow stories.

“If being a denizen of the Pulp Jungle made a writer part of a special subculture, then there was a subset of that subculture where pulpsmithing and sleight of hand intersected. An amazing number of them were amateur or performing magicians.” 

Fleming-Roberts, G.T.. Diamondstone: Magician-Sleuth . Altus Press. Kindle Edition.

Here is a short list of stage magic-inspired pulpsters: Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, Norvell Page, Paul Ernst, “Curtis Steele”, Ken Crossen, Clayton Rawson, G. T. Fleming-Roberts, H. P. Lovecraft.

And the intersection between stage magic and mystery is natural, as Murray points out, “Misdirection is the stock-in-trade of the performing professional illusionist and escape artist. Mystery writers also employed it to keep their culprits before the eye of the reader, yet unsuspected until the climax.”

For the science fiction fans, add Issac Asimov to the list of magician-authors as well. He was part of a New York social circle known as the Witch Doctor’s Club, a collection of writers and magicians that included many of the names I previously mentioned as well as Orson Welles. Like a stage version of Fight Club, if it was your first night, you had to perform a stage magic routine…

Audiobook Wednesday: A. J. Raffles in "The Ides of March"

Before Batman and The Shadow, before Arsene Lupin the First an the Third, there was Arthur J. Raffles, amateur safe-cracker.

I think I may claim that his famous character Raffles was a kind of inversion of Sherlock Holmes, Bunny playing Watson. He admits as much in his kindly dedication. I think there are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal a hero. 

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Quick Thoughts: Inward and Outward Focus

Recording a few observations and quotes as I stumble towards an organized conclusion...

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Because writing is removed in time and space from the audience, the sense of the writer as a performer is lost. An actor or a musician must tailor their performance based on the audience’s reactions–or to get the precise reaction from the audience that they want. A magician must manipulate an audience’s attention so his tricks appear “out of nowhere.” Yet writing and the industry are more concerned with Platonic ideals of what art should be instead of going out and busking for a living and getting that all important practical experience in front of an audience.

Pulp is outward focused writing (from the author's standpoint). While much has been written of the aesthetic, lost in the shuffle is the pulp editor's insistence that pulp writing evoke strong emotions. To do this, a writer needed to observe the world around him, observe people, and use that in their storytelling

Today's writing is often characterized by a search for the Platonic ideal of story, with the beats in the right place and the proper mix of characters and attitudes. It worries more about matters of craft than matters of audience reaction. It is inward focused.

The tragedy of Save the Cat is that is was intended to train writers to better evoke emotions. Instead, it became yet another Platonic ideal.

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"A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger." - John le Carre

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"If you don't spend time watching real people, you can't do this, because you've never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people ... It's produced by humans who can't stand looking at other humans. And that's why the industry is full of otaku!"

Hayao Miyazaki, television interview, January 2014

(Benjamin Cheah's dissection of why Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash does not work is almost a perfect illustration of this Miyazaki quote. The show's understanding of the world is based entirely upon RPG tropes and not on the real world. While this is best exhibited in its fighting scenes, it also affects how its characters act.)

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"Did you ever come up against a book of writing technique that came right out and said: “Look, Joe, for Hell’s sake, forget all this guff about plot structure and be downright, just plain, ordinary entertaining.”? Well, that’s the main rule of fiction writing, for my money. That is the idea."

Turner, Robert. Pulp Fiction (Kindle Locations 274-276). Originally published by Quality House, 1948. Kindle Edition. 

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"The trouble with most of the rules of writing technique is that these very rules can be—and sometimes should be--broken, in order to make a story salable. To be salable, a story must first be readable. To be readable, it must be entertaining. It’s really quite simple.
"But how in hell can your story be entertaining, if every moment that you spent creating it, you were constantly sweating and straining to make it technically perfect inasmuch as “the man in the book” said it should be?"
Turner, Robert. Pulp Fiction (Kindle Locations 264-268). Originally published by Quality House, 1948. Kindle Edition.

Warning: Lupin The Third Will Steal Again...

Anthony's recent Castle of Cagliostro review at Castalia House sparked an idea. (By the way, I need to go back and explain why it is A Big Deal that Lupin III squared off with the Cagliostro family. His ancestor Arsene Lupin would be proud...) With the 50th anniversary of Lupin III coming up--and "Blue Jacket" Lupin hitting American TV--there's time to do a bit of an in-depth look at Japan's gentleman thief.

I'm thinking:

Lupin III TV series 4 (2015)
Daigen Jigen's Gravestone (2014)
Green vs. Red (2008)
Dead or Alive (1996)
Fuma Conspiracy (1987)
Lupin III TV series 2 (1977)
Lupin III manga (1967)

So, working backwards from the present day to the beginning of the MAD Magazine-inspired gentleman thief's adventure. I might substitute Castle of Cagliostro for the second TV series. Anthony's review was from the perspective of a Miyazaki fan and not really Lupin-centric.

While I have an eye for putting a fair bit of this on the Castalia House blog (my regular posting day falls right on Lupin III's 50th anniversary), the thief will appear here.as well. I've got far more Lupin III than appears on this list, and I also want to take a closer look at his grandpa, the French gentleman burglar Arsene Lupin. Without him, there would no Shadow, Batman, or Lupin II.

In the meantime, I hope you have a chance to catch Lupin III's return to American TV on Saturday on Cartoon Network

Emotion and Entertainment

Robert Turner shares some well-earned advice to pulp writers in his 1948 booklet, Pulp Fiction.

I hope you know what emotions are, because they play a prominent part in this not so gentle art of fiction writing. You, as a writer, are going to play on emotions, with words, as a pianist tickles the ivory keys with his fingers. At least, you are if you intend to succeed as a fiction writer. 

We all have emotions. Prod any reader’s emotional reflexes and, Mr. and Mrs. Writer, you are going to entertain him. I am not a psychologist, so perhaps my definitions of these terms will not be technically correct. But they will serve the purpose to show you what I am getting at, I think. 

To me, the condition of being entertained is a comparative state. It is being aware, the opposite of being bored. If you needle a reader’s emotions, he cannot be bored. There are many ways to do this. The more of them that you learn, the more powerful and successful a writer you will become. That is why, forever after you have sold your first story, you will constantly study people and other writer’s work, to learn more and more of the tricks of getting at people’s emotions. 

Examples are sometimes good for clarification. Okay. Let’s say that you love dogs. You are walking along the street and you see some guy kicking the hell out of some skinny, half starved little pooch. Or some sadistic guttersnipe is tying tin cans onto a puppy’s tail. What do you feel? It can be anger, or sympathy, or both. Those are emotions. 

All right, there are two nice little emotions all lined up and dusted off for you. Use them in a story. Substitute the villain or one of his henchmen for the guy doing the kicking in the example used. Substitute your hero--or heroine--for the pooch. I’ve started many a story that’s sold, with the hero getting hell beat out of him--or just coming out of unconsciousness and pulling himself to his feet, after taking a shellacking. The reader feels sorry for the character, he feels sympathy toward him. You have aroused an emotion; therefore, you are entertaining the reader.  

To do this properly, of course, you have to build a scene that comes alive in the reader’s mind. That hinges on the subject of realism and we will deal with that in due time. In the street scene example, something is really happening and you damned well know that, because you can hear the dog squealing or whining and you can hear the guy cussing and the sound of his boot connecting with the animal’s ribs. In the story scene, you’ve got to kid the reader into thinking it is actually happening. We will cover that, later.  

Now, for Job’s sake, please don’t start every story from here on in, with some poor guy getting the bejabbers beat out of him. That is only one way to arouse one emotion in a reader. There are hundreds--perhaps thousands--of other ways.

The Hidden Rules of English

Everyone has tun into one of those people online. The type of people who consider the rules of grammar not to be a free-flowing and ever-changing agreement in language, but a list of rules received on stone tablets from the nearest holy mountain. But there are hidden, fugitive rules of English not written down in the textbooks so beloved by the amateur grammarians:

“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

English speakers love to learn this sort of thing for two reasons. First, it astonishes us that there are rules that we didn’t know that we knew. That’s rather peculiar, and rather exciting. We’re all quite a lot cleverer than we think we are. And there’s the shock of realising that there’s a reason there may be little green men on Mars, but there certainly aren’t green little men. Second, you can spend the next hour of your life trying to think of exceptions, which is useful as it keeps you from doing something foolish like working. 

Actually, there are a couple of small exceptions. Little Red Riding Hood may be perfectly ordered, but the Big Bad Wolf seems to be breaking all the laws of linguistics. Why does Bad Big Wolf sound so very, very wrong? What happened to the rules?

For the answer, and more of these invisible rules of grammar, check out Mark Forsyth's article at the BBC.

Quick Thought: Trading Stories

Lately, I've grown to enjoy listening to the podcasts from the old veteran wrestlers like Ric Flair and Steve Austin. Not only does it provide a look at storytelling from another medium, it gives me a view on how the pros look at their craft. The old guys are constantly recommending matches for fans and up-and-coming wrestlers to watch, not just from an enjoyment standpoint, but with an eye on specific storytelling technique and mechanics displayed in the match.

This got me to thinking. It is common advice for a writer to read widely in their genres. However, I don't often see recommendations driven by technique. "Look at this book by this author and watch how he does this." Writing instruction on the web tends to be heavy on technique and formula, but sparse on execution and example.

So, if you're trying to help a fellow writer, what books would you recommend as examples of technique?

For example:

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics for framing stories and how to use story-in-a-story.

C. L. Moore, "Shambleau" for how to create characters using contrast.

I have seen Toni Weisskopf over at Baen recommend Georgette Meyer to anyone thinking of writing a romance. You can see this influence in Bujold's Vorkosigan saga.