When you create an author profile on Goodreads, one of the
first things it asks you to do is list your "influences."
They give you a great big box and say "help yourself,"
and they then stand back while you stop, and then stare out the window, sucking
your pen.
I've got to say, I didn't suck for too long before I came up
with the top name on my list.
The first book I read by Robert Crais was one of those anthology
ones. You know the kind? Those big bulky blocks that have three novels squeezed
into them. Those ones that are a nightmare to pick up, let alone open, and
read.
Now I’m a fairly big guy, so I shouldn’t complain, but when I
got that book I was lying in a hospital bed recovering from an injury I'd
received as a police officer. It is fair to say I wasn't really in the mood for
lifting great weights. But I was bored, and a guy in the next bed passed me the
book (block) across and I wasn’t going anywhere, so I dug in.
Since that morning all those years ago I've read everything
Crais has written. In fact, aside from my own, I think it is fair to say his is
the only website I check to see when the next book is due out!
What I am saying is that he isn’t just an influence, what I’m
saying is:
I love Robert Crais.
What is it that I think makes him special? I could say his stories,
which are a mile a minute and packed full of thrills. I could praise him for
the way he brings hot and humid Los Angeles to life all around me, even when I’m
sitting in cold and wet Liverpool, England.
I could talk about his humour, or his sharp snappy dialogue.
I could say all of that, but the thing for me that sets him
apart is the warmth he imbibes into his characters.
That for me, is what makes him special.
Let’s take a look at his main protagonist Elvis Cole.
Elvis is an LA based private dick.
Nothing new there, there are more books about private
detectives in Los Angeles than there are actual, private detectives in Los
Angeles. Elvis though is different, he is warm, he has depth, he cares for his
friends, his clients, and they care for him. Sure he drinks, sure he is lonely,
sure he can be violent, but, and this is the thing, he isn’t too much of
anything.
And that is where I think Crais gets it just right, he doesn’t
try too hard to make his characters interesting.
Elvis, and countless other characters in the book, don’t
have too many ingredients. Of course they are complex, but they are like a
perfect soup, packed full of ingredients, but too much of anything, the balance
is always perfect.
Perfect.
Speaking as a writer it is sometimes easy to drift into
giving your characters too much “character.” It is easy to make them pained,
lonely, angry, despairing, and sad, and then to set them off into the world
with all that hanging out of them like an overstuffed couch.
But the problem is, real people are seldom like that, real
people are normal people. Real people exist in ordinary situations, getting
through the day, doing their best to get by.
Real people are normal and Crais’s characters are nearly
always “normal”, it is just that they are in extraordinary situations.
And that’s why I believe in them.
And although I don’t write about private eyes in LA, I do
try to follow his recipe, because I think a reader will care about a real
person, and if they care about the character, they’ll care about the book.
I’m not saying there isn’t space in the world for Jack
Reacher, of course there is, fourteen million people who buy the books prove
that. But what I’m saying is would you miss Jack if you never met him again?
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