I have published two books and sold 10s of copies, so I’m, like, officially a writer. Even my mother, however, has given me commercial advice at this point:
“You really should write something people want to read.”
She’s the closest thing I have to an agent, so I feel like her advice needs to be followed. Because she is right. And I’ve known this for a while, but I did need that artistic time to write LGBT books about the meaning of life and God and the collapse of youthful enthusiasm and the black hole that is your life when you get to your 30s and realize that nothing is the way you imagined it.
You know, fun stuff.
All things that are nice to meditate on, but people probably don’t want to read a 500-page gay book about it. Let’s be honest.
But, I needed that time to do that, and, to be honest, I’d rather write my pensive tome book now than if I write a book people do like then say, “Well, you liked that light romp, now LET’S TALK ABOUT GOD BUT ALSO SODOMY.” In the long game, I probably made the right choice to focus on “my art” for the first two books and now have some fun.
Which is what I’m doing. And has been a huge relief. It took me 5 years to write Burn and it took me 6 months to finish a draft of a 300-page mystery novel. Because it’s enjoyable! It follows a set narrative structure! The characters are 3-dimensional, but the extra dimension isn’t buried in some obscure past or tightly bound to social structures or expectations that require heavy narrative to explore!
And as I embark on this endeavor to actually write something people want to read, I look to the queen.
Agatha. Freakin. Christie.
I feel like people don’t really know who Agatha is. If you look at sales charts in the world, the best-selling authors of all time are God, Shakespeare, THEN AGATHA. I actually once had a conversation with someone who said, “Agatha Christie? Pfffffft!”
You don’t “Pfffffft!” the Queen of Crime. It’s just not done.
But, I do need to confess now that I was like “What’s the big deal? Why has she sold two billion books?”
Right, two billion.
So I started reading her books. Not only because I wanted to find out what the big deal was, but I was also working on my own mystery and wanted to see what the master did.
After a (pseudo) analysis, I can say that the two biggest things about her books are that they are like a game and, the second, the game is a lot of fun. Every time you pick a book up, you accept the rules that Agatha is the gamemaster and you, the player, will go through her prose labyrinth and try to beat her to the solution. But, the reason she is the queen is Agatha, like, always wins.
Sometimes she cheats. But, you kind of love it when she does. The end of Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and And Then There Were None are all masterful sleights of hand. Even when the cheating is obvious (I’m looking at you Mystery of the Blue Train), it’s okay, because there is enough fun and intrigue in the pages to justify the outcome. After finishing Blue Train, I said out loud, “Okay, Agatha. I’ll allow it.”
Which leads me to my second major point is that her writing is just so accessible and fun. She can paint a character with a sentence of description and a line of dialogue. My absolute favorite of her characters is Caroline in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She is HILARIOUS. A sassy, single older lady who knows everything in town. In gay terminology, she is an “icon.” But Poirot, Miss Marple, and others who enter and leave her pages are just as fun. In Blue Train, you have the golddigging French woman who brightens every page she’s on.
Another reason this whimsy is kept up is the stakes are not what you’d think that they are in a murder mystery. It’s not emotional. People die by the droves and no one gets that upset – the stakes are figuring out who did it – playing the game.
Honestly, one of the reasons I think the Harry Potter series was so huge is that they function as little mysteries, much in the vein of Agatha. (Spoilers Coming). Just like Ms. Christie, J.K. Rowling, sets up fun, whimsical settings with a mystery, but, similar to Agatha, J.K. always wins: Voldemort is ATTACHED TO QUIRRELL’S HEAD?? SCABBERS IS AN ANIMAGUS?? Those brilliant plot twists that take everything you know in the story but bend them to a new direction are exactly what Agatha did for years.
If you watch the most recent film adaption of Murder on the Orient Express, the film starts out with this whimsy, but … then… wow… like, do we need a dramatic snow scene with Oscar-bait speeches from the whole cast?
Agatha would say no.
She’d be like “Yeah, then Poirot is like ‘All of you did it!’ then you can have a good jazz standard play you out.” Low stakes, but great twists.
And, to be honest, at this point in my writing “career” I think that’s what I’m ready for. I did serious; I explored my craft. Now it’s time to have fun and write something with above-average poop jokes and a lot of word play.
I have a pretty good track record for it, too. While I was in grad school for writing, I would write comedy and people actually liked it. They hated anything else.
“I don’t get this kid coming out story you wrote. People love gay people. They don’t have any problems anymore.”
That was said to me in 2011. Before gay marriage but after the Great Gay Ascendance when our lives were rendered perfect.
On the flip side, I wrote a story about a drunk college professor who had a meltdown in a café and then danced to ABBA at the end. (Sorry, Agatha, it’s not jazz, but I think you would have rather liked “Dancing Queen.”) When I turned in that story, my professor said he almost fell of the toilet he was laughing so hard. I have no idea if that’s true, or if it was an attempt to get me to stop writing literary fiction, but it was really the only compliment I got in 3 years of the program.
Even when I went back to my writing history, I’ve loved absurdity since the beginning. In first grade I wrote a short story on Halloween about how Captain Hook and Vanna White were in a conspiracy to steal children.
The standard has always been high.
So, going into my next round of edits on my new book, I’m hoping that, even if the text is incoherent the jokes are herent and people won’t notice. Agatha did her best to instruct me how to plot out a proper murder mystery, but I’m not sure if she completely succeeded.
I suppose we’ll have to wait until the last plot twist.
*Begin smooth jazz standard*