by Mikita Brottman

This essay on crime fiction does a good job on capturing some of the essences of  what is, admittedly, the somewhat vague nomenclature 'alternative fiction.'  Since Mikita interest are in a particular subject matter and style,  her writing is alternative as it approaches crime fiction from a different perspective. Her incorporating different narrative styles and formats, she also touches on our most recent calls for hybrid submissions. The first few chapters of Mikita Brottman's  "Bel Air"  and "Thirteen Girls" are uploaded on Red Lemonade : http://redlemona.de/mikita-brottman/thirteen-girls and http://redlemona.de/mikita-brottman/bel-air . Thirteen Girls is coming out this summer from Nine Banded Books : http://www.ninebandedbooks.com/thirteen-girls/)

People often say we’re living in a uniquely voyeuristic and amoral society galvanized by a dreadful predilection for human suffering, but our interest in grisly details is nothing new. As every crime fan knows, there’s always been a huge public appetite for details of real criminal cases. In his book Illuminations, author and critic Walter Benjamin claims, “what draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” Benjamin’s suggestion hits home: I’ve always been compelled by crime stories, both true and fictional, though what I’m really looking for (and what I’m trying to write myself) is something in between.

          Today’s crime fiction tends to be either hard-boiled or too plot-driven for my tastes. Writers like James Elroy and David Peace are overly stylized and staccato, and I find the mystery / detective novel too confined to genre restrictions. I don’t need a strong protagonist or any protagonist at all, in fact. Personally, I’m not looking for formal daring or stylistic innovation, nor do I necessarily need the story to end with resolution, comfort or consolation.

          The “true crime” genre is equally bound by rigorous (if implicit) boundaries and restrictions. As authors working in this field know well, cases must be chosen wisely. “True crime” writers seem to assume that the kinds of crimes people want to read about are those they’re already familiar with (or think they are). Interestingly, this is one of the few literary genres dominated by women. Top authors like Ann Rule and Kathryn Casey are phenomenally popular and prolific, yet their work tends to be formulaic, and framed precisely to suit the way we’ve been preconditioned to receive it. There’s always a victim (usually young and female) and a perpetrator (often an older male). The story begins with a tragedy, proceeds through clues and signs, and ends with arrests and penalties. In other words, the “true” in “true crime” is descriptive, not all-embracing; not everything that “really happened” makes good “true crime.” To appeal, a story must lend itself to a certain formula, and it must have entrance points for moralizing voyeurism and righteous indignation. It should also lend itself to certain trite phrases: disappearances must be “mysterious,” evidence must be “crucial,” crime is “brutal,” details “graphic,” dead girls must be “laid to rest.”

          Like much crime fiction, true crime has a linear, progressive trajectory. A horrible event occurs, the perpetrator is arrested by police and tried in the courtroom, and the victim’s family finds healing and closure. On either side of this, there’s an enormous amount of filler—family histories of victim and perpetrator, a discussion of geographic economy and culture, and a blow-by-blow account of the trial. Whenever I pick up one of these mass-market “true crime” paperbacks, I usually start a few chapters in, and give up half way through, when the trial begins.

          There’s an assumption that crime writing is edgy because it deals with transgression and violence, but this is seldom the case. Strict plot formulas and genre rules often lead to staid and static writing. Complex cases are reduced to simple tales of good and evil, stories of the quest for “truth” and “justice,” and there’s never any question about who the victim is in each case. In Thirteen Girls and Bel Air, I’m trying to break out of these limitations by exploring an alternative form of crime writing where the distinction between “true crime” and “crime fiction” isn’t so clear-cut. I’m not really interested in plot trajectory or in tying everything up in tidy little knots, but in showing how these cases become narratives only in retrospect. As things unfold, there’s no continuity. Instead, there are distractions, diversions, instability, flawed guesses, accidents and all kinds of variables. Crimes that are not solved immediately often remain unsolved.

          There are some models for this kind of writing. Hybrid crime fiction—the kind that’s “based on a true story”—can sometimes contain the best of both worlds, as with John Berendt’s slightly fictionalized Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in which Berendt “rounds the corners of the truth,” as he puts it. In some ways, this is part of a tradition started by Truman Capote and continued by writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Calvin Trillin in his book Killings, a series of portraits of violent crimes that reveal more about the communities in which the murders took place than they do the killers. Wisconsin Death Trip is another great example of this. I also love the shrewd and quirky first person crime “analysis” that Janet Malcolm does in The Journalist and the Murderer and her latest book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills.

          Most of all, what I look for are crime stories that pay attention to the kind of detail that other kinds of writing often overlook. Every murder has its little nooks and crannies, and these are the spaces I want to explore. The stories in my book Thirteen Girls are a series of repressed, parallel texts to those that customarily take precedent in mainstream “true crime” narratives. These stories, whether personal, forensic, accidental or contingent, are the forgotten, peripheral tales occasionally glimpsed in the spaces left by the “true crime” narratives we’re used to, which is not to say they are not also true, in their way. Each of the girls is a real person, and so are most of the secondary characters (such as their parents and families); others are composites, and some names have been changed to protect the living.

          Bel Air, which I’ve been uploading to Red Lemonade, is another hybrid crime book. It’s not about violent crime so much its fallout: the afterlife of murder through the eyes of the people it has affected, to a lesser or greater degree. As with most real crime cases, there are multiple points of entry, and the big questions are never really cleared up. In this book, I’m trying to keep a narrative voice at bay, letting individuals speak through trial transcripts and recorded witness interviews, which allow the case to be examined and re-examined from various different perspectives. I’m interested in what crime reveals about the ordinariness of people’s everyday lives, how it takes ordinary events and magnifies them until they become unrecognizable.

          In praising Diana Trilling’s Mrs. Harris, a carefully discerning account of a trial that made a celebrity of a woman who murdered her lover (Herman Tarnower, the Scarsdale Diet doctor), New York Times critic Anatole Broyard wrote how impressed he was by the author’s curiosity, “by her quality of close and sustained attention in our abstracted and inattentive age.”. It’s precisely this quality I love in crime writing. I always want to know everything there is to know about the victim. I want to know what she had for breakfast, the name of her dog, the size of her shoes. Part of the appeal of these narratives lies in their concrete descriptions of everyday life; detail is piled upon detail as irrefutable evidence of the victim’s “ordinariness”.

           In my view, the best crime writing is the kind that pays attention to the odd little details that more “highbrow” writing often overlooks. Read enough true crime, and ordinary, banal events start to look interesting. With enough precise details, the implications can be left open. Without glamorizing or mystifying their subjects, and without neglecting the importance of mood, authors like Malcolm and Berendt combine careful research with nervy speculation, turning ordinary, everyday events into deep, layered mysteries. There’s a lesson to be learned here, I think. Focus intensely enough on the commonplace, you can go all the way in and come out the other side, where everything is more complex and sinister than it seems. 

Chat Interview:

Mikita Brottman :

      My crime novel Bel Air takes the form of news, police, therapy and court transcripts, so it seems appropriate that this interview conducted by Brian McFarland in Gmail Chat, should take the same form. I’m interested in the transcript as hybrid form, especially in relation to what leaks out around the edges, the extra bits of information at the beginning and end that don’t form part of the interview proper. To me, these leakages are not peripheral but central—they’re little clues and signs, full of revealing detail. For this reason, the full transcript is kept intact here, including original spelling and punctuation.

 Mikita:  OK, all set!!

          Sent at 3:08 PM on Tuesday

Brian:  Yay!

Oh, I hit the arrow and it popped out.

can you reply?

Mikita:  I guess we aren't so good with postmodern technology...

Brian:  we suck!

we are Old School

Mikita:  keep trying?

Brian:  this seems to be working now

( we can edit this part out)

 Mikita:  OK - try not to let it pop out again!

          Sent at 3:10 PM on Tuesday

Brian:  yes...and in that regard...follow me here... the idea that we can take are written words and remove them, change them, edit them.. ( I am trying to formulate the connection here)....

it references how writing has this 'criminal element' to it

it allows one to transgress the normal bounds...

          Sent at 3:12 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  I think that's true. And we can convey a very deliberate impression of ourselves in words, when our bodies tend to betray us much more easily. Words are a kind of mask.

          Sent at 3:13 PM on Tuesday

 Brian:  yes, but also this idea of 'editing' and forgive me this is a trite stretch into the realm of the horrific.....but - in regards to physical murder-- this idea of just taking something out of the equation....

          Sent at 3:14 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  I think murder is often made into something much more exciting and exotic in conventional true crime writing, though. In "real life," I think it is sometimes as simple and commonplace as editing, just deleting someone from your life. It's often a very banal act, like with those nurses who euthanize old people just for the fun of it.

   Brian:  Yes and your stories about the women and girls touch on this, this ordinariness.....

          Sent at 3:17 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  So in a way, there's something very untruthful about "true crime." As I suggest in the blog post, it's highly formulaic. And rarely do you see anything from the perspective of the transgressor, so the pleasure in vicariously taking part in the crime isn't really a part of it.

I'm not sure of the etiquette of Gchat - I hope it's not rude for me to type while you're typing, or before you've replied....

          Sent at 3:20 PM on Tuesday

Brian:  Well, that was something I was also gonna touch upon- there is that excitement of being part of something that is out of bounds, individuals who don't follow etiquette- we live in a world of social constrictions and technological hoops to be jumped, parking spaces, time clocks, signs, rules...

(when reading crime fiction I mean)

          Sent at 3:21 PM on Tuesday

Mikita:  Right. But most conventional crime fiction follows pretty strict rules - and it's those that I'm trying to get around in my work. So much of it seems just "filler" - the trial, the mandatory courtroom scenes, the police procedures, the family history, blah blah blah... I want to cut out all that stuff and get to what matters. To me, that's not the crime necessarily, but the impact of the death on those left behind.  Sent at 3:24 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  I love reading interview transcripts, police documents and that kind of thing. That's what I'm trying to do with "Bel Air" - get rid of all the extra, unnecessary stuff, including the narrative voice.

Brian:  The narrative voice which weaves a story built upon our expectations of just words on the page, structured stories, but also this mythic kind of sense that there is chaos/disruption and then a return to order.....

          Sent at 3:27 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  Yes. It's sort of like the voice of god, or a "deus ex machina" that comes down to sort everything out at the end. I think independent publishing allows for the possibility of hybrid forms that give voice to others involved - the victims, the perpetrator, relatives, individual police - who can then speak in their own words, even if those words are fictionalized.

 Mikita:  which allows "true crime" to be really "true" - ambiguous, open-ended, confusing, unclear, difficult to understand - unsolved, in a lot of cases.

          Sent at 3:30 PM on Tuesday

 Brian:  bringing in the police interview, the detective report, the comment from the neighbor, this unclearness is melded with this day to day banality, the regularity of the dayclock...but the ordinariness blends it all together too much maybe...there is a bled out human there somewhere....maybe lost in all that levelness, that reportage...

Sent at 3:33 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  right, but that's what's so interesting about it, to me. An annoying disruption in one person's day is, to someone else, a cataclysm, a nightmare. It's interesting to hold both perspectives at the same time, instead of being sucked in by one narrow way of seeing things, which is the Nancy Grace approach. And I like to remind people (and myself) that the trivial is also spectacular and horrifying.

          Sent at 3:36 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  Plus, in "Thirteen Girls," I hoped to pile trivial detail upon detail so they stack up into something overwhelming, really emphasising the impact of the loss.

 Mikita:  Are you still there?

 Brian:  the heavy weight of the trivial beating of our hearts...its so tempting to move this discussion into the realm of tv, film, sociology, American legal system....but let's stick with words, and how the language you are using here is going against the genre and bringing that humble narration to the center, and in that regard how language itself locks in so much...I think Burroughs said summarizing something about Wittgenstein ' the imprisonment of words' and that is a sense of what we are touching upon- but I like how the prison is associated with language...

trying to make thought come out clear using wordy words

          Sent at 3:41 PM on Tuesday

 Mikita:  Right. Words can be a prison. They can trap you into certain modes of thought - like the word "victim." If there's a "victim," there has to be a "perpetrator". In some respects, images are more freeing. But words can also be liberating.

Mikita:  Liberating in that they allow different voices to speak, in that they let various perspectives be heard. Images can't do this. Words are subtle and complex. They contain so much. They can compel, convict, imprison, release.

 Brian:  and be used in different forms/formats their structure telling part of the tale...

 Mikita:  Yes, and this is true of the spoken, as well as the written word... but there's something especially compelling about spoken words that are written down.

Unlike the kind of chat we're doing now, which is written (not spoken), a transcript of spoken words has a kind of haunting resonance - everything takes on a new tone.

Brian:  and in a very big book of words- the killing starts of very early, like the first page...Cain and Abel....

and even from the very first take on the story, there is a vagueness as to how the murder should be interpreted sheep herder versus farmer? or proper offering to God? or sibling rivalry......

to say nothing of the centuries of re-telling....

          Mikita:  that's why it's so strange that people take it literally... who knows what was originally meant? Whereas court transcripts give us the "official" version of "what was said" in a particular situation.

          Sent at 3:50 PM on Tuesday

 Brian:  but dont you think some of that is just the disruptive power and the emotional shock of the act itself ? do we really lose that much in the sensationalism of it? doesnt it reveal the undercurrents and structure of the world which resulted in the killing

 Mikita:  In "sensationalized" true crime, by focusing too much on the act itself and the victim, I think we lose the complexity, the way in which social and cultural forces have their own part to play. Very, very few murders are actually "random."

Brian - I need to leave in 10 mins..

Sorry I don't have longer - this is fun.

 Brian:  yes, Cain and Abel was my closing comments...I was trying to wrap the story around by starting at the Beginning

but I think we really touched on what the alternative reveals

 Mikita:  Thanks for setting this up - I will send you a revised version of the blog post early next week.

Brian:  and then we can post this chat and the blog post- it will be cool!

but do me a favor--leave your chat window open, I need to make sure I can get this all saved/copied

 Mikita:  OK, Roger. Over & out!

 Brian:  and we can even go through and maybe edit/tighten this up in transcript form! Thanks!!!!