Story #31: 😈 Dance with the devil
This is what happens when I read an airport novel
In my local library branch, there’s a rotating selection of books on a round table near the circulation desk. Right now, in February, it’s books by Black authors; in January it was books about hygge and fiber crafts. In December 2021, it was a bunch of gift-wrapped books, each with a little card on the front with a synopsis of the story.
I ended up choosing a book that sounded like a film noir whodunnit, with the bonus addition of Frank Sinatra and the brat pack as characters. Part of me knew that I wouldn’t choose this book normally, and it was exciting to be given permission to step outside my regular reading habits.
I got home and unwrapped it. It was The Devil May Dance, printed in raised capital letters overlaid on a scene with the Hollywood sign. It was precisely the kind of book I would see at the airport and not buy.
I binge-read it in one afternoon. It delivered what it promised, which was a madcap caper featuring famous people and imaginary people, where all the strings get tied up in little bows at the end. It offered the kind of certainty that is so very much lacking in real life.
And you know what? I found some sentences to share with you.
The story
I won’t get into the specifics of the book or its plot, except to say that it’s set in the 1960s and it’s a detective story. It reads as a modern version of a Raymond Chandler book, updated with a husband-and-wife detective team in Charlie and Margaret Marder. It’s a look at the Brat-Pack 60s through the lens of 2020s wokeness, with enough fun to make it palatable rather than political.
Simile
I especially liked that author Jake Trapper invoked similes that were appropriate to the world he was writing about. On page 15:
On the passenger side, a man with white hair and a bullfrog neck that swallowed his chin rolled down his window and flashed his ID.
Bullfrog neck! It’s such a vivid image, the rolls and the physical stature of the man to whom it belongs. Trapper doesn’t give us more than this sentence, but it would be a great entry point into more about this bullfrog character.
One page later, on page 16, protagonist Charlie Marder visits his dad in prison:
The sight of his father—stooped in his prison grays, undereye bags so big they could hide contraband, hands shaking—had hollowed him.
First, “undereye bags so big they could hide contraband” is both melodramatic and appropriate, a simile that fits into the world of the story. (Bonus points if you hear it narrated in a Humphrey Bogart kind of growl.)
There’s a sense of everything being droopy—dad’s stooped and dressed in gray, and even his undereye bags have given up. Charlie’s reaction is to feel hollowed, adding to the sense of loss in this scene. We get a sense of prison being a black-and-white land compared to the technicolour of life on the outside. And of course, there’s lovely alliteration here, in of hide / hands / had hollowed him.
Adjectives
I’ve talked before about the rule of threes and rhetorical structure, that we gravitate to lists of three things. It feels satisfying.
But it can also feel satisfying to have longer lists, and on page 40, Trapper uses it to distill fancy words down to the truth. This is when Margaret Marder, having met members of the Brat Pack and their entourage, realizes they’re highly flawed people:
Public images were as fragile as they were phony, Margaret had concluded, so it wasn't surprising to find that the silver screen's wholesome girls next door and pillars of manhood were, in reality, lascivious, desperate, drunk, sad.
I love those last four adjectives. The words start big and complex, and each time they get shorter and simpler until they trail off completely. It’s like it sputters out, finally landing on the truth.
Also notice that there’s a shift in the types of words that Trapper uses. Lascivious and desperate are both Latinate words, while drunk and sad are Germanic.1 If you skipped out on Etymology 101, this is relevant because Germanic words tend to be more direct.
Overall, we get a sense of the sentence shedding its armour, almost like the wholesome girls and pillars of manhood are themselves being undressed. As the layers of public image come off, they’re revealed in their true state: sad.
Show, don’t tell
Finally, I liked this passage from page 80. Here, Sinatra is Frank; Judy is a (presumably) invented character in the book:
Sinatra stood above the shallow end of the pool at the Sands and observed the lovely Judy as she made her way up the steps and over to a chaise, twisting her dark wet hair into a ponytail, leaving a trail of drops that quickly evaporated on the concrete.
This caught my eye because of the way Trapper shows us that it’s hot, without actually using the words. The scene also stands in for how Sinatra and his ilk operate in the world—Trapper uses the word observing, but with an undercurrent of objectifying. There’s a sense of privilege in the way that Sinatra watches Judy in this scene, one that pervades the book in its exploration of power and sex and greed. There’s also an underlying theme of the hunter and the prey, which you can see in this sentence.
At the same time, there’s restraint in the description of Judy. I can imagine a version of this paragraph that goes into more explicit detail about her body, which would tip things into explicit objectification, rather than the hint of it. This is the author in the mix, making a detective story palatable for modern tastes and not alienating women readers, whom he is clearly trying to court with the husband-and-wife protagonist team.
Why it works
Certain types of books are seen as worth reading and others aren’t. I think these excerpts show us that even if you’re reading a pulpy whodunnit, you can expect to be treated to decently constructed sentences, witty similes and even some artfulness. It shows that the techniques of good writing can be applied wherever you want to point them—whether that’s highbrow literary fiction or an airport novel.2
What we can learn from it
Over the past few years I’ve been working on being less judgmental about…everything. I’ve learned to do this with music, which has meant being able to embrace genres that I previously didn’t understand. But I’m still prey to being judgy about books, and so it was a good exercise to read a book that I wouldn’t have chosen under other circumstances.
Which is to say, every book has something to teach us, if we are willing to meet that lesson with an open mind. I think that’s a good principle to keep in mind, and one that can be extended to people as well. Everyone has something to teach us, if we are willing to meet that person with an open mind. Now that’s something to chew on.
Share this story like you’d share a book with Rory Gilmore.
If you’re not up on word origins, one way of seeing the difference is to look at the language around eating meat. In English, we use the term beef to describe meat from a cow. That’s borrowed from the French/Latinate, which has one word to describe the animal (vache) and another for the meat that comes from it (boeuf). In contrast, German uses the word Rindfleisch—literally, cow flesh.
For example, romance novels are commonly poo-pooed as being a waste of time. Similar with mass-market chick-lit, a la the Shopaholic series. It’s no coincidence that commercially successful books like these, aimed at women, are seen as unworthy literary contributions. More to the point, these genres, especially self-published romance novels, are a fascinating study in plotting, conflict and character development—never mind audience analysis, A/B testing everything from drafts to cover art, and marketing.