I came late to crime fiction. After a childhood full of my dad's collection of science fiction and men's adventure (military-trained killers with monikers like The Executioner and The Destroyer), by high school I'd dropped genre fiction entirely for the different pleasures of so-called literary fiction, in particular experimental literary fiction. "Make it new," Ezra Pound had said, and more than half a century later I heard his call.
My twenties were spent as a self-consciously experimental writer, and then I arrived at MFA grad school. By that point, I was making a third attempt to write my first publishable literary novel -- which is another way of saying that I was failing prolifically. The problem was not only that I'd taken Pound's call too literally, but that while my studies required me to read slow-burning, linguistically beautiful novels that studied the inner workings of the human soul, as a writer I was naturally drawn to the darker side of storytelling -- corpses in exotic locales, and the like. As a good MFA student, I resisted my natural urges. And my failures continued.
Like most literary writers, I'd always been a fan of film noir, but it wasn't until then that I finally got around to reading one of the great inspirations for such movies -- Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.
The Big Sleep wasn't the first crime novel I'd read, but it was the first one that hit me so hard. I was mesmerized by the story, the prose, and the narrative choices Chandler had made. It was brilliant stuff-for me, it was new. Why weren't my professors telling me about this?
I didn't ask this to be coy, but because I'd learned a crucial lesson reading Chandler that I didn't feel my reading lists were delivering: a supercharged story, full of pistols and pistol-whipping, could be told with sharp, incandescently original prose. Such a book could, for long stretches, be as literary as the tales of suburban angst that already carried that label.
I'd like to report that a light flashed in my head and the world became a different place, but no -- I wasn't there yet. As a novelist -- particularly as a budding, insecure one -- I still felt the need to wear my credentials on my sleeve. So it took time, a move to Romania and back, and the failure of that third novel.
It was while shaving one morning, feeling frustrated by my lack of success, that the light finally flashed: I'd been trying to be experimental for so long that I didn't even know if I could write a straight story with a beginning, middle and end. In other words, a plot.
Then I remembered Chandler.
And sat down to write my first published novel, a mystery called The Bridge of Sighs. My seventh novel will come out next year.
I sometimes wonder where I'd be now were it not for The Big Sleep. There's no way to know, but I have the sneaking suspicion that things wouldn't be half as fun.
Do you think crime fiction should be readily taught? What works would you include in your syllabus and why?
Editor's Note: Olen Steinhauer's latest novel, The Tourist, has been hailed as "serious entertainment that raises interesting questions."
