Men from Boys

Introduction

It began with a simple enough idea: a book which would collect together stories by those writers in the crime and mystery area whose work I respect, admire and enjoy most. Simple? Well, no.

For one thing, the choice would be too vast, the book too large. But then, unbidden, the title leapt to mind: Men from Boys. And once it was there, lodged in my brain, it wouldn’t leave. It was — it is — a kind of statement, a declaration, but also, and crucially, it provided a focus and a theme.

It also had the effect of cutting the number of writers I might have approached by half. No McDermid, no Fyfield, no Stella Duffy; no Grafton, no Paretsky, no Julie Smith. No Alice Sebold. No Suzanne Berne.

Just men.

Men writing, for the most part, about what it is to be a man.

To succeed; to fail. To open one’s eyes.

What the majority of the pieces in the collection address, some directly, others more tangentially, are issues of self-knowledge, of accepting — or denying — certain responsibilities. What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a son? What does it mean to be a man?

As the protagonist in Don Winslow’s ‘Douggie Doughnuts’ comes to realise, there are things you do and things you don’t do. Again and again — but never two ways the same — the people who inhabit these stories are having to determine what is right, what will give them dignity, what will earn them self-respect.

Some — the young men in Mark Billingham’s ‘Dancing Towards the Blade’ or Michael Connelly’s ‘After Midnight’, for instance — make their choices with their fathers’ voices ringing in their ears; others have to contend with parents who are venal at best, incorrigibly corrupt at worst.

Little is perfect. In Daniel Woodrell’s beautifully understated ‘Two Things’, the best a father can say of his relationship with his son is that it was ‘something terrible I have lived through’. Andrew Coburn’s marvellous novella takes us through three generations of an extended family whose members variously fall to sudden acts of violence or simple self-regarding avarice, and where the strength of purpose and single-mindedness of the father is passed on not to the son but to the daughter.

So did I achieve my aim to include all of those, now admittedly male, writers I revere? Of course not. No matter how many times I wrote and faxed, e-mailed and phoned, no matter how much pleading and cajoling I engaged in, there were some — a few — whose dance cards, for whatever reason, were regretfully too full. A pleasant diversionary party game might be to guess who these were. Just don’t ask: I’ll never tell.

But if all had accepted that would have simply meant a bigger book. There is no one here whose name I am not pleased and proud to include; no piece of work that has not earned its place.

The trouble with writing short stories, as James Ellroy has recently lamented, and as most of us I’m sure would agree, is that they take so damned long to write. For every earnestly crafted page, at least a chapter of a novel would likely come whizzing off the computer and with less heartache. ‘There is no room for error in short stories,’ says Annie Proulx. ‘The lack of a comma can throw everything off.’

That’s why we keep doing it, of course. Trying to. One reason, anyway. Testing ourselves, testing the skill. It certainly isn’t, unless we’re lucky enough to turn heads at The New Yorker, for the money.

‘There’s a joy’, says Donald Westlake (and, yes, he’d be in here if I had my way), ‘in watching economy of gesture when performed by a real pro, whatever the art.’ He compares writing short stories with playing jazz: ‘a sense of vibrant imagination at work within a tightly controlled setting’. He says it’s what turns writers on. Readers too.

There’s a real pleasure for me in the way the writers of these stories create worlds that are instantly recognisable and believable yet as widely apart as a deprived London housing estate and the trenches of the First World War, the claustrophobia of a late-night back-room poker game or a rundown jazz joint in Manhattan and the slow but irrevocable decay of the small New England town on which Don Winslow riffs so passionately. I’m in awe, too, of the way James Sallis leads us through a landscape delineated with absolute clarity, except that by kicking away the narrative props that we’re used to, the scene takes on a bewildering half-amnesiac state which mirrors what is going on in the central character’s mind.

The prospect of Bill James’s lustful yet lethal Assistant Chief Constable Isles let loose in a posh private girls’ school and of Brian Thompson’s semi-retired geezers girding up their loins to take on the Russian mafia both fill me with delight, and I give myself up joyously to the promise of Dennis Lehane’s ‘Until Gwen’, whose first sentence hurtles us along with dangerous expectation. ‘Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon with an eight-ball in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.’

And...

But enough from me. Enjoy. Read on.

John Harvey

London, January 2003