William Landay

Official website of the author

Blog

Win an advance copy of “Defending Jacob”

For the next couple of weeks, you can win an advance copy of Defending Jacob. These pre-publication editions are actually pretty rare. Intended for reviewers and booksellers, Random House is printing fewer of them than they used to, as all publishers are these days. I was only able to wheedle a few of them out of my editor. I’ll be giving away four to people who are on my mailing list. Details are here.

And while I’m openly shilling for my books, a little reminder: if you haven’t “liked” my Facebook fan page, please do. I’d love to have all these social-media channels ready when the book comes out next winter. The only way to promote a book is word of mouth, and this is what word of mouth looks like now.

“And then I saw her…”

When I’m stuck — as I have been for some time now, trying to crack the plot of my next book, to “break” the story, as screenwriters say — I always look for older stories to use as templates. The writer David Lodge has a great term for this sort of literary model: “precursor texts” (which I’ve mentioned here before). Books, movies, whatever — the form of the story doesn’t matter, only the quality of the storytelling. In fact, movies often make the best precursor texts, since their plots are compressed, highly structured, and easy to see. Screenwriting is storytelling stripped bare. Maybe that is why movies, if they’re the right movies, often get my imagination unstuck.

In this case I have been analyzing stories that touch on my book’s premise: a man vanishes into thin air, leaving his wife to cope with daily life in his absence and to solve the mystery of his disappearance. How have other, better storytellers handled that scenario?

So the other day I found myself watching “Out of the Past,” the classic 1947 noir directed by Jacques Tourneur, with Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer as the woman who’s gone missing. The movie is one of my absolute favorites. So much has been written about “Out of the Past,” I will refrain from gushing about it here. Suffice it to say: if you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it in a while, go watch it this weekend. You won’t be sorry.

Here is a taste, with Greer and a 30-year-old Mitchum, in his first leading role. They’re both great, but Mitchum just jumps off the screen. If they remade “Out of the Past” today, Greer’s black widow role could be played capably by Angelina Jolie, say. But what young actor today could fill Mitchum’s shoes?

Orwell on Dickens

Two quotes pulled from Orwell’s classic 1940 essay on Charles Dickens.

Why is it that Tolstoy’s grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens’s — why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens’s are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens’s people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy’s, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character … because Dickens’s characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing that they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about anything else.

And a little further on:

What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.

Our golden age

homicide rate chart

The U.S. murder rate (homicides per 1,000 people) over time. Contrary to popular perception, ours is among the safest eras in U.S. history. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Orange sunrise

orange sunrise

This photo, by Frans Lanting for National Geographic, has not been Photoshopped or retouched in any way. It shows a place called Dead Vlei in Namibia in the early light of dawn. Details about the making of the photo are here. (Via PDN.)