Vintage Article: “A Love-Story Writer Learns To Kill”

As my self-publishing adventures have hit a lull, and as I’m too mentally burnt out to write a true review just yet, I thought I’d hit y’all with a vintage article, this time Doris Knight’s “A Love-Story Writer Learns To Kill” (from The Author & Journalist, December 1943).  Knight was primarily a romance writer, but she also dabbled in crime/detective fiction, as this article demonstrates.  (From the sound of it, a number of them were actually cross-over stories, that bridged both genres, and as such probably read as precursors to today’s romantic suspense category.)  Knight’s romances are rather hit-and-miss for me—there are some I’ve enjoyed (1934’s “Extra Sheer” I’d even label a low-key favorite), but then there are an equal amount I’ve been distinctly “meh” about.  Still, color me curious about her detective stories, and hopefully I can track a couple of them down at some point.

Knight had been writing for the pulps for close to two decades by 1943, but—as far as I can tell—this is the first trade article she penned.  (The first trade article she penned under her own name, at least—more on that in a moment.)  The personal issues I can have with her writing aside, there’s some decent advice to be found here (and not even detective-fiction-specific, I’d say).  Perhaps most notably is that it reveals two of her many pseudonyms: Knight Rhoades and Myra Gay.  (Other pseudonyms would be revealed in a later article.)  Going back to the topic of names, though it’s apparently the first trade article she wrote under her own, readers might remember my last vintage article, by one “Myrtle Clay,” wherein I speculated the author was actually Knight.  I’ll confess I’m still leaning that way, due to stylistic similarities, but feel free to read both and decide for yourself (and maybe even throw that “Sally Gordon” article in there, too, while you’re at it).

 

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A Love-Story Writer Learns To Kill

By Doris Knight

 

I wanted to write detective stories!

Don’t get me wrong.  First, last, and all the time, I’m a love-story writer, and I like my particular field and intend to keep on writing love yarns.

But I wanted to be a detective story writer, too.

There were a good many things against my becoming one.  People told me not to swap horses in the middle of the stream.  (Since I write to eat.  It isn’t a hobby.)  There was another don’t like a stone wall in my path.  Everyone said detective stories must be plotted carefully beforehand, step by step.  I belong to the school of writers who take a group of interesting characters and a situation, and toss them in, then stand back and see what happens.  I can’t work any other way.

One day, about three years ago, I began a serial for Love Story Magazine.  I took some people in the newspaper and political game.  I got them into a dilemma.  I titled the story, “Society Column.”  Everything went smoothly with the writing till, at the very climax of the first installment, bang, there was a dead body!  A murdered corpse, no less.

I sweat blood, trying to get that cadaver out of the way.  But no.  It was as hard to dispose of as a real corpus delicti would be.  I was stuck with it!  So, since the characters had taken over, I thought I might as well have some fun, personally, and let them finish the story.  Because I had to find out who did that murder!  I wrote a love-mystery serial.  (At the end, I found out who did the murders, too.  And let me tell you, I was surprised!)

In fear and trembling, I took the story to Miss Daisy Bacon of Love Story.  (I was crazy about that story—and I needed a check badly.  The taxes were due.  Otherwise, I’d never have had the nerve!)

Miss Bacon, bless her!—bought the story.

“Society Column Murders” was my bridge across the gulf which spans love and mystery.  And I was learning my craft.  I got across on that bridge to the detective story shore, where I craved to be.

Ten more serials followed in quick succession, in which love and mystery mixed.  (“Lucky Thirteen,” “The Disappearing Brides,” “Widowed Bride,” “Woman Hater,” “Romance in the Caribbees.”  Those were a few of the titles.  Written under my tradename, Myra Gay.)

Then I figured I’d graduated into straight detective stories.  I wrote “Death and Mr. Angel,” which not only was published in Detective Story, but leads the All-Fiction Annual of this year.  Next I did “Death At Square House,” which was published in the October Detective Story.  (Under another tradename of mine, Knight Rhoades.  Because I found out, long ago, that men prefer to read detective stories written by men.  The meanies!)

Maybe you’ll say, right about here, “How will this help me to change specialization fields?  This gal was lucky.  She ‘happened’ to write a story that hit.  She was lucky enough to find an editor with a flexible policy and an open mind.  What does that get me?”

It gets you this.

If you want anything in the writing field hard enough to work like heck for it, you can do it.  If you think you can!  And, if you read enough of the type of stuff you yearn to write, so that it seeps into your very blood-stream, and one day comes out in typewriter ink on a clean page of paper, despite yourself!

Technique is a marvelous thing.  I’d be the last to decry it.  I spent years—from the age of nine to seventeen—in conquering the ABC’s of technique, with a master of the craft, the late William C. Morrow of San Francisco.  I learned my love-yarn technique from him.  I learned it, thoroughly and painstakingly, sprinkled with the tears of the very young, and bitter despair, and hard work.  Then, I forgot it.  Rather, I buried technique, deep in my subconscious mind so I’d never consciously think of it again, and it wouldn’t get in the way of the story I wanted to tell.

(Remember.  Your readers don’t give a hoot in hades about technique—as such.  They don’t know about plots and counter-plots and climaxes and main conflict.  They want to read a good story which holds their interest and is believable.)

The same is true for the detective story technique.

I didn’t have any teacher to crack the whip and wax sarcastic when I buried the story I had to tell under useless word-shrubbery.  I had no one to remind me to hew to the line, and not go chasing down by-paths, unimportant to the story.  I was on my own.  I was grown-up.

I possess a library in which all modern detective writers are represented.  I read and re-read those books.  Thus, the detective story technique came, not by studying text books, but by diligent and very pleasant reading of detective fiction.  And by reading so many detective stories, the technique crept into my subconscious mind and directed me in my own writing.

*

There is nothing occult; nothing spooky about that.  It is hard common sense.  Read, read, read, in the field you wish to enter.  Read for years.  Read omnivorously.  Read intelligently.

Then see pictures.  Mental pictures.  Conjured up by your imagination.

I like the movies.  That makes it simple for me to “see” my stories.  I remember, with my ears, the voices of the movie people I’ve chosen as my hero and heroine and villain.  I put them in scenes, mentally, and then write down what I see.  And the things said.  Want an example?  All right.

Take Cary Grant as a hero.  Rosalind Russell as a heroine.  Van Hefflin as a heavy.  Give them good, terse names, easy to recognize.  Think what sort of a story you want to write.  Society-murder, hard-boiled, or psychological killing.  Having made your decision, watch your first complication unfold before your mind’s eye.

Visualize the opening scene exactly as if you were seeing it on a stage.  A tropical setting.  Panama perhaps.  The men in uniform.  The charming girl.  The man thinks the girl has been two-timing him with the commercial air-lines pilot he’s hated for years.  They have a fight.

(I see that fight, just as if it were taking place before my eyes.  I see a lot of things I don’t put down on paper for fear it might slow the action.  Detective action must be fast and hard-hitting.  But I know that setting thoroughly.  I’ve seen it.  I’m steeped in it.  Thus, what I do put down, rings true.)

To go on:

The Man threatens to kill the Pilot if the Girl dates him again.  Circumstances compel such a date.  The Girl fears the Man has found out, so she goes to warn the Pilot of his danger.  But on the way, she is delayed.  (Perhaps the wheel on the horse-drawn carriage becomes loose.  Valuable time is lost.)  By the time she arrives at the Pilot’s apartment, he is dead.  Murdered.  She is suspected of the murder.  She thinks the Man she loves did it…

Heck.  Why should I plot your story for you?

But that’s what happened to come out of the ether, just now, when I shut my eyes.

*

I’ve traveled so much in the far places of the earth, that I visualize many of my scenes in distant places.  Such scenes are familiar to me and yet, at the same time, I see them in a romantic light.  How about you?  Try it.  Close your eyes.  Pretend you see a stage set and people on that set, saying and doing things to further an exciting story.  Doesn’t that help you to plot your stories?  It does me!

By bitter experience I’ve found that the beginning detective story writer had better write of charming, normal characters, who happen to be flung into the midst of murder, the way people in real life are.  If you write a story of unpleasant people getting killed by other, equally unpleasant people, who cares?  Make your readers care, by making your characters so vivid and exciting and charming it hurts to have them turn out to be murderers.  (Take that murderer in “Disappearing Brides” for instance.  He was so nice!  I hated to have him turn out the villain.  But he was.)

What are the best sources of detective plots?

In my opinion, newspapers, and your own experiences.

Read about the murders and near-murders in the newspapers.  Don’t write your stories on the moment.  Bury them in your mind.  As a dog buries a bone.  To “mellow.”  When you dig up the stories, they will be different from the actual murder.  They will be more interesting.  They will belong to you.

Maybe you’ll query that one about your own experiences!

No.  I’m not hinting that you number a group of murderers in your list of friends.  Or that you go around sticking people in the back with a sharp knife.  Far from it.  But…haven’t you ever wanted to murder that bore who ruins a party at your house?  Or that girl who flirts with your husband?  Or that man who tells you he’s gotten over loving you?  Well, what are you waiting for?  Take it out on paper instead of in a courtroom on trial for your life!

Don’t “kid” murders.

You can be humorous about some of the characters.  You can wisecrack and have some fun writing the dialogue.  But don’t forget that life is the most important possession any of us ever have.  If we lose life, it’s no joke.  Don’t try to be so breezy and nonchalant in a story that you kill your chances of having the yarn published.

Read over your story.  Be sure you’ve made everything crystal clear.  I’m doing a rewrite at this moment on a detective story, because four points, which were very straight in my own mind as I wrote, were very hazy in the minds of readers of the story at the publishing office.  A detective story must have everything dovetail neatly.  Everything must be explained.

Don’t pile up a huge amount of explaining at the end of a story.  If it turns out like that, throw the manuscript into the nearest stove and start out afresh.  You’ve missed the boat.  The trick is to make your explanations as you go along.  Without spoiling your finale.  Difficult?  Sure.  But if you work at it often enough and hard enough, you’ll get the secret.

Never, never have two characters in a detective story named alike.  Don’t have any of the names begin with the same initial letter.  Detective story readers read fast and not too carefully.  They want to solve the mystery.  Find the answer.  Get to the finish.  If you’ve put a Jeff and a Jerry in the same yarn, heaven help you!  Don’t have Mary and Marie.  Or Fayne and Jayne.  It’s fatal.

Don’t be afraid to let yourself go on making the reader’s blood run cold.  Get that creepy, eerie, scared feeling into the story and you’re half-way to success.  Get a great deal of that crawly, frightening background and action into the yarn and you’ve sold the story!

If you have unusual people and an unusual setting and a lot of nice, gory murders, your job is cut out for you.  You must make the story plausible.  Possible.  Probable.

It’s better, if you’re a beginner, to take a very commonplace setting and set of characters.  The people who live next door to you, perhaps.  Or the boarding house where you live.  Depict them as clearly as possible.  Into that commonplace setting, with these everyday people, bring murder!  Then see what happens.

If you can plot carefully, do so.  Plan your story.  In detail.  But don’t make the mistake one man did.  He had an office desk filled with files.  One was for Characters, Heroes, Heroines, Murderers, Sub-Characters.  Another was for settings, travel folders, newspaper descriptions on various spots in the globe.  Cross-references to encyclopedias.  Another contained sub-plots.

It was a lovely reference library for writing detective stories.  Only—it took all his time collecting the files and pictures and clippings and so on!  Never did he get down to the writing of the stories!

Here’s my summing up.

Write whatever you want to write.  Even if it’s off your beaten track.  But be sure you’re not afraid of work.  And read, read, read, in your chosen field!  Especially, if you’re doing a switch in type of story.

Incidentally, I’m working on my first 60,000-word book, just now.  So, if I’m lucky—and I’ve learned my craft well enough—I’ll be seeing you in the Lending Libraries soon.

Wish me luck, won’t you?  And the same to you!

 

A portrait of Knight, as included with the original article.

Tagged: 1940s, author & journalist, crime, daisy bacon, doris knight, love pulps, pulp, romance, vintage article