Kaufman Just Wants to Have Fun

(Editor’s note: British correspondent Ali Karim has been somewhat absent from this page for the last couple of months, busy with his day-job responsibilities. But he recently submitted the interview with author Thomas Kaufman that appears below. Welcome back, Ali.)


Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce (left) and Thomas Kaufman attend the Shamus Awards ceremony in St. Louis, 2011.

I’ve been following the work of Thomas Kaufman ever since the publication of his first novel, Drink the Tea, which introduced laconic Washington, D.C., private eye Willis Gidney and won the 2008 Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press competition for Best First P.I. Novel. Kaufman’s follow-up, Steal the Show (2011), was even more engaging. There is compassion and dry wit in the oft-troubled world of Willis Gidney, which makes Kaufman’s stories a pleasure to read.

In synopsizing the plot of Drink the Tea, Kaufman’s publisher, Minotaur Books, described Gidney thusly:

Willis Gidney is a born liar and rip-off artist, an expert at the scam. Growing up without parents or a home, by age twelve he is a successful young man, running his own small empire, until he meets Shadrack Davies. That’s Captain Shadrack Davies, of the D.C. Police. Davies wants to reform Gidney and becomes his foster father. Though he tries not to, Gidney learns a small amount of ethics from Shad--just enough to bother a kid from the streets for the rest of his life.

Now Gidney is a P.I., walking those same streets. So it’s no surprise that when his closest friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, asks Gidney to find his missing daughter, Gidney is compelled to say yes--even though she’s been missing for twenty-five years. He finds a woman who may be the girl’s mother--and within hours she turns up dead. The police accuse Gidney of the murder and throw him in jail.

Maybe Gidney should quit while he’s behind. But when his investigation puts him up against a ruthless multinational corporation, a two-faced congressman, and a young woman desperate to conceal her past, Gidney has no time left for second thoughts. In fact, he may have no time left at all.

In an overcrowded genre, Kaufman’s gumshoe is a most refreshing and watchable player. But what also makes this series enjoyable is the author’s cinematic storytelling style. He comes by that style honestly: for years Kaufman has been laboring behind the lens of a movie camera, primarily as a director of photography but occasionally as a director/cameraman. His many credits include work on Discovery Channel productions, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and the very popular NBC-TV series The West Wing.

I’ve met Kaufman at Bouchercons over the years, including the 2011 event in St. Louis and again at last year’s Bouchercon in Cleveland, and have learned a number of interesting things about this now 57-year-old novelist, filmmaker, and musician (in his spare time, he plays upright bass and bass guitar). During the 2012 Shamus Awards banquet, however, we took the opportunity to chat at greater length about his life in film, the influences on his prose-writing, the genesis of Willis Gidney, and much more. Then recently, I asked him some extra questions, including about his brand-new e-book, Erased and Other Stories. The results of those exchanges are posted below.

Ali Karim: Tell me, what compels you to write?

Thomas Kaufman: This whole writing thing, it’s like a sickness. I blame it on the airline industry. Working as a cinematographer, I travel a lot. If the airlines hadn’t kept me waiting endlessly in terminals, or sitting on the tarmac, or wasting hour upon hour in soul-sucking tedious travel, I might never had reached the frustration level necessary to say, screw this, I have to use this time somehow. I got a laptop and started writing Drink the Tea.

AK: Do you come from a family of readers?

TK: Yes, and quite a few writers too. My aunt Carole wrote opening monologues for Steve Allen on The Tonight Show before turning to non-fiction books. My uncle Ted wrote several non-fiction books as well. My brother Pete has a novel out, and will soon have a true-crime book about identity theft during the Yukon gold rush. And my niece Miriam has a book of poetry. A number of librarians in the family as well.

AK: During your early education, what were the books and authors that influenced you most, steering you toward the writing world?

TK: I read a lot of science fiction growing up--starting with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, graduating to [Arthur C.] Clarke and [Isaac] Asimov, then Harlan Ellison, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Alfred Bester. Around 16, I read Dickens, Thackery, Thomas Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and Somerset Maugham. At 18, I was given a copy of Farewell, My Lovely, and that’s when the penny dropped. I decided that somehow, some way, I was going to write a P.I. novel.

AK: Do you read widely in the P.I. genre, and what do you see as pivotal novels featuring private eyes?

TK: I read all of [Raymond] Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett, of course: they’re the Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet of American detective fiction. Then there was Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy, Frederick Brown, Chester Himes, Ross Thomas, Charles Willeford, Donald E. Westlake, and Lawrence Block. Plus lots of others I’m not naming, of course.

AK: Americans usually consider P.I. fiction a U.S. creation. But credit must certainly be given to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well. Are you a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson?

TK: You have to credit Conan Doyle for creating what is arguably the most memorable character in detective fiction. As to origins, Holmes came about 40 years after Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first private-detective story, but you don’t see Robert Downey Jr. playing [C.] Auguste Dupin, do you?

AK: Given your interest in cinematography, what do you make of the various big- and small-screen incarnations of Holmes and Watson, from Basil Rathbone to Benedict Cumberbatch?

TK: The current BBC series with Cumberbatch and [Martin] Freeman is great fun. The director, Paul McGuigan, seems to have taken a page from the Guy Ritchie playbook, in terms of the way the programs are directed. It has a modern feel, and that’s fitting because the show makes Holmes and Watson modern characters.

The tools of cinematography have changed a lot since Basil Rathbone first appeared as Holmes. Still, the aesthetics have changed very little. It’s all about story. The cinematographer’s job--like the director’s, the editor’s, and the sound recordist’s--is to help tell that story. If you compare the relatively static camera of those early Holmes films with the moving, variable frame-rate work in the most recent Holmes movies and TV shows, you see a world of difference. You can’t deny the commercial success of the newer Holmes films, but there’s something about Rathbone as Holmes that’s compelling.

AK: From whence did your interest in cinematography spring?

TK: Well, in addition to a family of writers and musicians, we also have photographers. My mother, Joanne, was a graduate of the Eastman School, and taught aerial photography to the Army Air Force during World War II. My cousin Jordan Klein won an Academy Award in technical achievement for designing underwater camera housings (he shot the underwater sequences for [1954’s] Creature from the Black Lagoon). My uncle and brother were still photographers. So it felt natural at an early age to fool around with still cameras. At age 10 I had built a darkroom and thought that was the bomb, until I discovered an old 8mm motion-picture camera in our attic, and taught myself how to shoot with it. No idea what I was doing, of course. I just knew I was having fun.

AK: That eventually led you to study film production at the University of Southern California. Can you tell us a little about that experience, and were you also writing fiction during your student years?

TK: I was writing all through high school, and wrote my first novel at age 22. I loved being 22, and thought I had written something perfect. I couldn’t understand why no publishers wanted it. When I read it now, I see that it’s not fit to line a birdcage. As to living in L.A., it was like a six-year out-of-body experience, apart from the traffic jams.

AK: Tell us a little about some of the film productions you have been involved in. And I see that you have some awards on your mantelpiece.

TK: I’ve been very lucky, in that I’ve worked with great documentary directors--Charles Guggenheim, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore, and Mark Jonathan Harris, to name a few. Just as I’ve tried to learn from the writers I admire, I’ve also tried to learn from the directors.

Sometimes people tell me how hard my job is, that as director of photography, I’m in the hot seat. But it’s nothing compared to being the director. In a way, being a director is like being the author--whether a project succeeds or fails is on you.

When I moved to Washington, D.C., I found out about Gallaudet University, the world’s only university that serves the deaf and hard of hearing. They also have education from pre-school through high school. When I visited their pre-school, I grew fascinated with how quickly children learned sign language, and decided to make See What I’m Saying, which won an Emmy Award. I’ve also worked on three Academy Award-nominated feature documentaries. One of them, Promises to Keep, is about homelessness, and informed my writing Drink the Tea.

AK: A personal favorite among the productions in your canon is 2010’s chilling look at the legacy of the Cold War arms race, Countdown to Zero. Can you tell us about working on that project?

TK: Lucy Jane Walker directed Countdown, and she had some great ideas about how to shoot the film. Basically, she wanted a similar look to The Bourne Identity. I think I achieved some success there, but for budget reasons they had to scale back, and I wound up shooting far less of the film than I would’ve liked. Working with Lucy was great fun, and we filmed what I believe is the last interview with [former U.S. Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara. He gave an impassioned plea for the world to eliminate all nuclear weapons. It’s a great film, and a worthy topic. [Editor’s note: At least for the time being, you can watch all of Countdown to Zero on YouTube.]

AK: You’ve labored on these documentaries, but have you ever wanted to film a piece of fiction? Working behind the camera can be akin to creating your own view of a situation, as a novelist tells a story.

TK: Ali, I knew you’d get to that eventually! First, I have shot fiction. I won the Gordon Parks Award for my work on an adaptation of Cinderella called Ashpet (1990]. I’ve also been a camera operator on The West Wing, and shot behind the scenes for The Wire, 24, and [the TV miniseries] John Adams. As to writing, there’re many parallels between filming a scene and writing a scene in a novel. For instance, where does the camera go? It’s a basic question, relating to point of view. Is the camera looking up at a character, making the character seem powerful and important? Or is the camera looking down, making that character seem weak, powerless? Is the camera moving or static? Does the camera use a wide-angle lens to emphasize the spaces between people, or a telephoto lens that seems to stack people close together?

When you write a scene, you have to consider point of view, and where your audience/reader is in relation to the characters. After so many years behind the viewfinder, I tend to visualize the scenes I’m writing. Where are my actors? How do they move? What’s the staging?

You want to see some great staging, check out the opening of Sullivan’s Travels [1941], by Preston Sturges. Early in the film, there a three-minute continuous take with three actors in a small space that’s incredibly dynamic. It’s visual, yet so subtle. Imagine getting that into a book!

AK: You have carried out a good deal of research with cops during your documentary filming. Could you share some of your experiences?

TK: I got to be friends with a producer who was doing crime shows for a cable channel, and he asked me to direct and shoot a number of episodes. I had a blast. The policemen and -women I met were natural storytellers, and they had great stories to tell. I’m still in touch with four of five of them.

One of the stories I did involved a guy who killed his girlfriend, burned her remains in a 55-gallon drum over three days, then emptied the remains into a nearby stream. He still had to dispose of the drum, so he drove it to a construction site and left it there, among all the other drums. The problem? At dawn, the foreman noticed that all of his drums were green, but someone had left a blue one. You see, in the dark, the colors looked much the same. So the foreman called the cops, who found bone fragments. A forensic anthropologist was able to tell from the fragments that the victim was a Caucasian woman, early 20s, between 5-foot-4 and 5-foot-8, and weighed about 120 pounds. Given time, I think the forensics guy could’ve told the cops how much change she had in her pocket when she died. Anyway, the cops were able to locate the victim’s boyfriend ...

Here’s the thing, though--after the boyfriend gets rid of the 55-gallon drum, he goes to a bar, gets pissed, and tells the victim’s brother-in-law what he did. He confesses everything! The brother-in-law tips off the cops, who arrest this scumbag.

Now, do you think the confession made it into the show? Guess again. As the producer explained it to me, for the show to work, all the criminals had to appear to be geniuses, so that the cops looked even smarter when they caught the bad guys. This helped me realize that “reality TV” isn’t real, and it’s often barely TV. I think Donald Westlake had fun satirizing it in Get Real, the last Dortmunder novel.

Author Kaufman reads from his novel Steal the Show at Washington, D.C.’s renowned Politics and Prose Bookstore. Part II of this presentation can be found here.

AK: You share a similar background with Lee Child, who worked in TV film production before becoming a novelist. Do you think that both of you share that cinematic sense of perspective in your storytelling?

TK: What’s funny is we both worked for Granada Television, though Lee worked full-time as a director in the UK, while I shot only the occasional job in the U.S. Lee’s books are cinematic, I really enjoy them.

When I write a scene, I tend to see it happen. That’s the result of years behind the camera viewfinder, watching life unfold. So I visualize where the actors are, how they move, what the lighting is like, but I’m aware of the other senses, too. Unlike film, a book can involve all the senses. Does a place have a unique smell, taste, or touch? George Orwell excelled at combining all the senses to bring his world to life in the reader’s mind. In Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949], Orwell gives the reader an all-too-real look at what the future may bring.

The other thing is, I keep yelling “Cut!” when I finish writing a scene. This really upsets the people at Starbucks.

AK: Did you have one of those wonderful “eureka moments” when you consciously applied yourself to writing fiction?

TK: More like a “get off your ass” moment. After [composing] that first novel [at 22], I knew I wanted to write another, and wanted it to be a private-eye novel. But I put it off, concentrating on film work. When my first child was born, I realized the clock was ticking. So I started writing on a more regular basis.

Most of Drink the Tea was written in airplanes or hotel rooms, while I was traveling on shoots. I still write outside my home, but now find I don’t have to be on an airplane to get a chapter done. So long as I sit in a cramped position, drink coffee, and eat little bags of peanuts, I can pile up the chapters.

AK: Other than that first, youthful novel, do you have a drawer with other early work, all gathering piles of dust? And did those efforts prove to be learning experiences?

TK: That first book taught me what not to do, and showed me what I didn’t know. I’m a better writer because I wrote it.

As a teenager I took a week-long workshop with jazz pianist George Shearing and his group. I had lessons in the morning with his bass player, Andy Simpkins, who was terrific. And in the afternoon we all got together, Shearing would hear us play and talk with us. Driving to the first day of the workshop, I thought I was God’s gift to jazz. By the end of the week, I realized I knew nothing at all.

So on the very last day, Shearing sensed that some of us were feeling pretty down. He said, don’t worry, if you feel that you know nothing it means you’ve learned something this week. The thing to watch out for is the feeling that you know it all, that you’ve got it all under control--that’s when you’ll stagnate as an artist. I think that’s true for writers as well as musicians.

AK: Two years before it actually appeared in print, Drink the Tea won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press contest for Best First P.I. Novel. Tell us about that experience and also about what Robert J. Randisi and the PWA [he founded] mean to you, since you seem to have a fascination with the private-eye genre.

TK: Each year St. Martin’s has four different competitions for different mystery genres. For the P.I. genre, it works with the PWA. I applied and was instructed to send my book to Robert Randisi as my judge. I thought I was screwed. I mean, Randisi knows the P.I. genre better than anyone. Drink the Tea is not a conventional P.I. story. So I figured there was no way I could win the competition. In fact, when I sent the manuscript to him, I distinctly remember thinking I was throwing away $6 in postage. It was a shock to learn I’d won. I still think some ghastly mistake was made, though I’d never admit that publicly. This is all off the record, right?

AK: Tell us a little about you series lead, Willis Gidney. Where did he spring from? And why use Washington, D.C., as the stories’ backdrop?

TK: Let’s answer your question with a question: Are you troubled by unsightly back story? Do you wish those troubling details could all be erased?

That’s what I thought when I was creating Willis Gidney. Why bother with back story? Just invent a guy who doesn’t have one. So Willis Gidney is a product of an author’s laziness. I decided to make his early life forgotten. Since I’d worked on Promises to Keep, I thought it’d be a good idea for Willis to have grown up homeless. Traumatic childhood, memory gone. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. It turned out I had quite a bit of research to do, relating not only to homelessness, but also D.C.’s juvenile justice system. Of course, this was a good thing in the long run, but lots of heavy lifting. Hey, I got into this racket for the easy money and loose women. Still waiting for both, I’m afraid.

AK: I hear that George Pelecanos, another writer who uses the U.S. capital as a backdrop, enjoys your work.

TK: George has said nice things about what I’m doing. He’s one of the best writers in America, in my humble opinion. He’s also a neighbor, and over the years he’s offered solid suggestions and insights about what I’m writing. George’s D.C. is different from mine, but that’s because we’re different people. I love his work, and reading his descriptions of D.C. is like reading great reportage. The only other writer I've read who is as insightful about D.C. is Edward P. Jones (check out his Lost in the City).

AK: Recently, Scottish author Ian Rankin, when he was being interviewed by the BBC about the return of protagonist John Rebus [in Standing in Another Man’s Grave], said that he might not get on with Rebus if he actually met the man. Might that same thing be true if you encountered Willis Gidney in a bar?

TK: Willis has got some issues, but it would be hard not to like the guy. I often think of him as a nephew who doesn’t take advice terribly well. But I think we’d get along. We’re a lot alike. In fact, if I were taller, younger, better looking, and had faster reflexes, we could be twins.

AK: Are you a detailed plotter, or do you allow your imagination to take you on a journey traversing the high-wire?

TK: I talk to writers about this from time to time. The bottom line is, whether you outline or do it on the fly, you’re going to spend time staring at a blank page. I think outlines are terrific, I just suck at writing them.

The P.I. story is primarily an American invention, and so is jazz. So it feels right to forgo an outline and riff my way through a book. I once heard jazz bassist Rufus Reid talk about playing a song. He said that once you learned the melody and knew the chord structure, the song becomes a playground. The melody and chords are like the rules of the playground, so once you know them, you can have lots of fun. I think the same is true of a mystery, or of any genre, for that matter. Writers just want to have fun.

AK: There’s a lot of pathos in Gidney’s back story and also in his investigations, and in both Drink the Tea and its follow-up, Steal the Show, you pepper the narrative with social commentary, which adds a dimension to the tale. Would you care to comment?

TK: The great thing about the P.I. novel is how adaptable it is, how much you can do with it. It can be funny, dark, a thriller, a whodunit, a puzzle piece--whatever you want it to be, provided you know the rules of the playground, right? This includes social commentary, and who better to talk to the reader about disparities than the private eye? He crosses all boundaries--social, economic, political, and in Willis’ case, ethical. Plus, D.C. is a great town to write about, because it’s the home of the federal government, which controls the purse strings for what’s really a small Southern town, where people work and live and pay taxes. So the conflict is built in.

AK: Was it hard to follow up Drink the Tea, which was a remarkable tale of the dark side of family dynamics, with Steal the Show?

TK: I began a story arc that covers three books, starting with Drink the Tea. My P.I. finds an abandoned child and the smart thing is to turn her over to D.C. juvenile services, but he can’t bring himself to do it, since he barely survived D.C.’s system himself. In Steal the Show he’s trying to do right by this kid, and it leads to unforeseen complications in his life. I thought it was a good story, and I liked Willis getting antagonized from all sides. The next [still-untitled] Gidney book continues this particular arc, and the reader gets deeper into Gidney’s character.

I think family conflicts spring up like mushrooms in a forest. Steal the Show had it’s genesis in a story a friend told me about a father, a son, and a third man, who became partners selling an electronic device. They became successful, and the father and the other man squeezed the son out of this business. The son had signed a non-compete clause, and he used that time [away from work] to redesign the device so he could compete with his father and run him out of business, which he eventually did. I thought that was an interesting family dynamic, and used it in Steal the Show.

AK: Did you plan that Drink the Tea would lead to a series?

TK: It wasn’t until I finished Tea that I realized how much I had come to know Gidney, and how much I liked him. I knew I wanted to write more about him. One of the things people tell me is that they love spending time with Gidney, and that to me is a fine compliment.

AK: Did the film backdrop for Steal the Show come from your own experiences in that industry? And do you believe in the old adage, “write what you know”?

TK: It’s certainly easier to write what you know, but it’s also important to write about what most people don’t know. When we read, we like to feel we’re getting an inside look at something, so I did that with Steal the Show. I’d done quite a lot of work at the National Institute for Standards and Technology [NIST], and was fascinated by cryptology and the digital revolution’s impact on it. Plus, it was fun to use people I’ve known from the film business as characters in the book.

AK: I enjoy the wit in your Gidney novels, as I think dark tales with striated morality often need a bit of humor to keep their narratives from becoming too gloomy. But tell us your own views on the deployment of humor in fiction.

TK: It’s tricky, because humor can undermine you if you’re trying to generate suspense. So I wind up cutting a lot of funny stuff in successive drafts, because I think it’s misplaced. Willis uses humor as a coping mechanism, so it’s OK in a tense situation, to an extent. But when he or someone he loves is threatened, it’s no time for jokes.

That said, I love humor mixed in with dark tales, and some people can do it perfectly--Donald Westlake and Carl Hiassen, to name two.

AK: One thing I really enjoy about the Willis Gidney novels is that they contain a sense of awareness of the problems weaker members of society face amid the randomness of life. I’m assuming that you must be of the liberal political persuasion. So what were your thoughts about last year’s U.S. elections?

TK: Ali, I’m not sure one needs to be a liberal to write about other people’s problems, but yeah, I am a liberal. A few years ago I had lunch with Lee Child and a dozen of his fans at Bouchercon, and I told him how appreciative I was for his anti-war views in Nothing to Lose [2008]. History will judge whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished anything worthwhile, but in the short run I can’t see that it did.

As to our election in 2012, I was petrified. In the summer of that year, I thought [Republican] Mitt Romney might actually become the next president. So I went out and canvassed door-to-door, I drove people to the polls (and wrote a short story about that, “Four More Years”), and I worked a phone bank--in short, I became the thing I hate, an odious pustule who calls you up while you're resting in the evening to ask impertinent questions, like who you’re going to vote for! But I was frantic, I knew I had to do this. If Romney won and I did nothing to help stop him, I’d hate myself for the next four years.

AK: So where are you with your follow-up to Steal the Show? And what has Gidney been up to since we last read about him?

TK: Gidney’s a lazy sod, I can tell you. I have to do all of the heavy lifting. He did form a jazz band, the Willis Gidney Quintet. It’s a skilled group of musicians, if you don’t count the bass player. We’re playing in clubs around D.C. and it’s great fun, even though Willis has yet to show up for a single rehearsal or gig.

Still, Gidney has condescended to appear in two of the short stories in my new collection, Erased and Other Stories. ... In addition to Gidney, I also have two stories that relate to the Holocaust. Years ago I shot a TV [special] with Walter Cronkite, Holocaust: In Memory of Millions, and interviewed people who survived the Nazi death camps. They told stories I’ll never forget. One of them was the basis for “Erased.”

Readers tell me they love Gidney, so I’m hard at work on the third novel about him, his girlfriend Lilly, and the bizarre Washington, D.C., scene that surrounds them. This new book goes deeper into both of their characters, and I hope readers will like it.

AK: Finally, can you tell us about some of the books you’ve read and been excited about recently?

TK: Lately? I’ve been reading Reed Farrel Coleman, Steve Hamilton, John Lutz, Allison Leotta, Laura Lippman, Daniel Stashower; and re-reading Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, and Lawrence Block.

AK: Thanks for your time, Tom. And you’re much better-looking in person than in your pictures.

TK: You’re very perceptive.

When Lightning Strikes

(Editor’s note: The following essay/film critique comes from Thomas Kaufman, an award-winning motion-picture director and cameraman from Maryland, who also pens the Willis Gidney private-eye series [Drink the Tea, Steal the Show]. His e-book, Erased and Other Stories, has just been published by Antenna Books.)

Few movies are as great as 1944’s Double Indemnity. And few people drove Raymond Chandler as crazy as director Billy Wilder. It wasn’t just Wilder’s mannerisms, his walking stick, his constant pacing while they collaborated on the script for Double Indemnity. It was also the constant stream of phone calls--Wilder chatting up young women, and scoring with them at night. How it must have galled Chandler, 18 years Wilder’s senior, to see this young man with broken English score with such a lot of babes.

Chandler apparently considered Wilder a good character. In his 1949 Philip Marlowe novel, The Little Sister, Chandler writes about a Hollywood agent with most of Wilder’s mannerisms intact. Take that, Billy!

To me, Double Indemnity is interesting because Wilder and Chandler turned a good book into a great screenplay.

American journalist and author James M. Cain broke new ground with his novels Mildred Pierce (1941), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), and Double Indemnity (1943). Even his lesser-known works, such as Career in C Major and Other Stories (1943), are worth reading. But like many books by the pulp writers of his time, Cain’s are often better in conception than in execution.

So how did co-writers Wilder and Chandler improve Double Indemnity? For one thing, the two enlarged the part of Barton Keyes, played on screen by Edward G. Robinson. In Cain’s novel, Keyes is a minor character, but in the movie Keyes is the third part of a love triangle between Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). I think Wilder and Chandler gave Robinson the best speech in the film, as he berates the front office owner of their insurance company for knowing nothing about the business.

For another, the narrative of the book is a straight chronology of events. In the film version, there’s a narrative frame, consisting of Walter’s confession to murder. This frame not only gives us all the expositional material we need, it also gives the whole story its tone--we know things are not going to work out for Walter Neff.

Then there’s the dialogue. Nobody wrote it better than Wilder and Chandler. Despite their differences, they clearly enjoyed the use of language. Take this scene as an example:



Listen to the rhythm of the dialogue, how MacMurray and Stanwyck spar with each other, and the great subtext that brings a certain heat to their interaction.

Subsequent movies such as Body Heat (1981) and China Moon (1994) owe debts to Double Indemnity, but I'm hard pressed to think of a modern motion-picture that has the wit and suspense of this classic. How about you? Have you seen a recent film that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Double Indemnity?

* * *

Click here to see the Double Indemnity trailer and Raymond Chandler’s brief, oft-overlooked cameo appearance in that movie.

READ MORE: “8 Great Noir Films that Revolve Around Life
Insurance,” by Hannah Peterson (Noir Nation: International Crime Fiction); “Billy Wilder and Double Indemnity,” by Thomas Kaufman (Spinetingler Magazine).

The Story Behind the Story: “Steal the Show,” by Thomas Kaufman

(Editor’s note: For the 23rd installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series, we’re bringing back Marylander Thomas Kaufman, an award-winning motion-picture director and cameraman, and the author of last year’s Drink the Tea, which introduced Washington, D.C., sleuth Willis Gidney and won the 2008 Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press competition for Best First P.I. Novel. Kaufman previously penned a piece in The Rap Sheet about Build My Gallows High, a “forgotten,” 1946 novel by Geoffrey Homes. Below, he supplies some background to his second Gidney outing, Steal the Show, which was released earlier this month.)

When I do a book tour, people ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?”

If there’s one persistent question, that’s it. And while I understand the subtext of the question (“How can I write a novel?”), it points to a basic misunderstanding of what writing a book really is, and isn’t.

The newspaper is full of ideas for stories. I always have my antennae out, just in case I run across something that gets me going. But an idea is not a book. So how does it work?

Well, for me, it’s like this:

When I moved to Washington, D.C., one of the first jobs I got as a cameraman was shooting for the National Bureau of Standards, now known as NIST. Some scientists were setting fire to a room, the same room, over and over again, and measuring the rate and pattern of the flame spreading. I remember it got so hot that the Pyrex safety glass in front of my camera lens melted--and the image kind of melted in my viewfinder. I thought I had lost focus!

I did a lot of work at that place, filming robotics, automated manufacturing, lasers, and cool ways to measure the flow of liquids (you guessed it: vortex-shedding flowmeters).

But the most sensational stuff was in the cryptography section. Those guys were making a walkie-talkie for the FBI that was digital, dude. In the early 1980s, that was way out there. And, they boasted, the signal was encrypted.

Now, that was cool. And it got me thinking about encrypted satellite signals. The U.S. military was using a code that changed every 30th of a second, but that was too easy to decipher. Its people were working on an extended code that would be virtually impossible to crack. Hmm ...

Through my contacts, I’ve been in film warehouses over the years, and can tell you that a six-reel print of a feature film weighs about 100 pounds and costs around $1,500. Compare that to a hard drive you can carry in your pocket. The idea of delivering movies into theaters via satellite intrigued me.

Sending something--anything--via satellite is not new. But using it to defeat film piracy is.

It’s hard to get an accurate gauge of how much money film distributors lose each year to piracy, but it’s somewhere between six and twenty. Billion dollars, that is. So you can see why it would be nice to stop the piracy. Encrypted satellite delivery of movies won’t keep out the kid with the handheld video camera, but it would reduce the number of thefts and illegal duplications.

So I had these ideas in my head: the whole satellite thing, and film piracy, how you could defeat the pirates with coded satellites. I spoke with the folks at NIST, who gave me great information, then they turned me loose on the technical director of film distribution at Warner Bros. This lady was terrific, and she also gave me names of other folks to speak with.

Like a lot of writers, I enjoy the research part of the job. Maybe too much. Sometimes I find myself reading just one more article, or talking to just one more person, rather than tackling my manuscript.

But I did speak with other experts. All good stuff. But kinda dry--not a book, not yet.

Then something happened. A friend had told me this story:

I used to work at a firm that makes a consumer electronics gadget. The company was owned and operated by three guys: a father, his son, and a third guy. Just when the company got red-hot, the father and the other guy squeezed the son out. Since the son had signed a non-compete clause, he used that time to develop the same type of electronic gadget. When the non-compete clause expired, the son announced his own company, in competition with his father. The son wanted to drive his father out of business.

In other words, payback.

I’m interested in family dynamics. For my first book, Drink the Tea (2010), I imagined a daughter who didn’t want her long-lost father to find her. My new novel, Steal the Show, uses the story I outlined above. The relationship between father and son intrigued me. What kind of people were they? So it wasn’t the idea, or the scenario of what happened, that interested me most; it was the why of it, starting with why did the son get squeezed out?

W. Somerset Maugham was one of the great 20th-century writers. He talked about visiting a prison in French Guiana. He was looking forward to meeting these desperate men, men who had killed out of love, hate, jealousy. What he found surprised him: virtually every inmate he spoke with told him the same thing--and it all came down to money.

Sure, an inmate might be jealous of his woman stepping out with another man, but after close conversation Maugham realized that a man killed because his woman was spending his money on somebody else. Making him a fool, in other words, and cheating on him at the same time. Or maybe a man killed his wife and business partner because they were committing adultery. But then Maugham found out it was the business partner’s mistakes which cost them a fortune--and the partner his life. Again and again, the urge to kill came from feeling ripped off.

From the results of his research Maugham wrote a story called “A Man with a Conscience” (1939) about a true crime of passion, perhaps the only one Maugham ever came across. It’s a great story, but it also puts writers like myself on the lookout. It’s as though Maugham is telling us to probe deeper, to see beneath the surface.

I try to do something similar, layering in motivations for both the good guys and bad guys, and in that way, attempting to make them as dimensional players.

In Steal the Show I try to look deep into my characters. I’m using my own store of human knowledge, using it to texture and shade the people on both sides of the law.

When we read a story, we want to be entertained--that is, we want the writer to hold our attention. But we’d like a bit more, please. We’d like to gain an insight into human behavior. We want the author to show us his understanding of the people about whom we are reading.

So a story may catch a spark from an idea. But the idea is not the story; the story is about what that idea inspires in terms of characters, the dimensional people who populate your book.

Last thing: when I read a book in which the characters are dimensional, they become alive for me. I sometimes find myself thinking about them, long after I’ve finished reading the book. In other words, the characters resonate for me. Has a writer ever affected you that way?

The Book You Have to Read: “Build My Gallows High,” by Geoffrey Homes

(Editor’s note: This is the 84th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection has been made by Maryland resident Thomas Kaufman, an award-winning motion-picture director and cameraman. His debut mystery novel, Drink the Tea, won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press competition for Best First P.I. Novel. It was released this week by Minotaur.)

Build My Gallows High (1946) was the final published novel by onetime San Francisco newspaper reporter Daniel Mainwaring, writing under the name “Geoffrey Homes.”

Its hero, a private eye named Red Markham, gets a job from a gambler named Whit Sterling to find his girlfriend. That girlfriend, with the improbable name of Mumsie McGonigal, has shot Sterling and taken off with a small fortune in cash. Markham finds the girl, falls in love with her, and attempts to have a life with her, double-crossing Sterling. The two lovers try to hide out, but they’re eventually discovered by Red’s ex-partner, Jack Fisher, who is accidentally shot and killed when he attempts to blackmail Red. Mumsie leaves with the cash, and Red must bury the corpse.

Years go by, and finally Red makes his home in a small California town, falls in live with a nice, quiet girl, and hopes to settle down. But his past catches up with him, in the form of Joe Stefanos, a trigger man for Sterling. Red’s hopes of leading a peaceful existence are crushed by Sterling and Mumsie.

You can’t really talk about Gallows without also talking about its 1947 screen adaptation, Out of the Past, which starred Robert Mitchum and was directed by Jacques Tourneur.

Usually, after I read a book, then see the film version, I’m disappointed. How many times have you left such a movie, hearing murmurs of “the book was better” from your fellow filmgoers?

But, once in a while, a film actually supersedes the novel. Not often. Still, if someone writes a book, then Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler do the adaptation, the screenplay could be better than the source novel. Such is the case with Double Indemnity (1944). Another example is Out of the Past.

I don’t feel bad giving Gallows second place. For one thing, Mainwaring wrote the screenplay for Out of the Past. It seems as though he had been given a second chance to re-imagine his characters. For another, Mumsie McGonigal is now Kathy Moffet, played wonderfully by Jane Greer.

The novel has two principal antagonists: a retired crooked cop, Parker, and a gambler, Sterling. The screenplay combines those two into one badass, played by Kirk Douglas.

(By the way, it’s fun to watch Mitchum and Douglas together--Douglas, who typically chewed the scenery into postage-stamp-size pieces, has to tone himself down to play opposite Mitchum, whose naturalistic underplaying predates by 10 years the bunch from the Actors Studio, who included Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, and James Dean.)

There are also two assassins in the novel working for Sterling/Douglas. The screenplay boils them down into a single person--Stefanos.

Another main difference between the book and movie is the story structure. They both begin the same way, in the “present,” then flash back to when Markham was a private eye in New York City, and Sterling asked him to find the missing girl.

But the flashback in the book ends about one-eighth of the way through. Part of the genius of Out of the Past is its structure. Once Markham and Ann--the good girl he wants to settle down with--begin driving to see Sterling, the film goes into flashback. Markham’s voice narrates the events, and we’re on solid P.I. movie footing. Then, at the exact middle point of the film, the car ride ends and so does the flashback. Markham has Ann drop him off at Sterling’s front gate, and the remainder of the film plays out in the present.

What’s great about this is the way the audience is set up for what happens next--all the characters we’ve met in the flashback now come alive in the present, as Markham tries in vain to figure out the kind of jam Sterling is framing for him. After some cat-and-mouse dialogue, Markham turns down what Sterling has in store for him, but agrees to stay for breakfast. In the background, out of focus, we see a woman approach. Sterling says, “You remember Kathy, don’t you?”

The audience is shocked, but not Markham/Mitchum, who turns his sleepy eyes towards this beautiful woman and says, “Yeah, I remember Kathy.”

Then there’s the movie dialogue--it’s classic. Since James M. Cain and Frank Fenton were rumored to have worked on the screenplay without credit, it’s hard to know who came up with the dialogue. When Kathy, the gambler’s girlfriend, shows up for a romantic liaison with Markham, she asks, “Did you miss me?”

“No more than I would my eyes,” he tells her. And Jane Greer is particularly beautiful as she touches Mitchum’s arm, and begs him to believe her when she says she didn’t take the gambler’s money. Mitchum reaches for her, saying, “Baby, I don’t care.” That dialogue is not in Gallows.

It’s important to the story, and to Markham’s motivation, for the reader/viewer to understand how deep Kathy/Mumsie has her hooks in. The book doesn’t go into much detail. Instead, we’re given a kind of shorthand--how the detective tails her, how they meet, how they come together, how they break apart--but the movie devotes much more time to this important element of the tale.

One other interesting aspect is the direction of Past. Jacques Tourneur was a contract director for RKO, one of Hollywood’s smaller and more troubled studios. In this film, he creates an unusual shot, right at the start: he mounts the camera in the back seat of Joe Stefanos’ car. Car mounts today are the norm, but back in the 1940s they were out of the ordinary. The effect Tourneur creates is that the car, Stefanos, and the story we are about to see all appear somehow pre-destined, on an unstoppable course, that Markham’s fate is sealed before he even knows he’s been discovered.

Daniel Mainwaring’s first book, published under his own name, was a sort of proletarian novel called One Against the Earth (1932). After that, he turned out a series of hard-boiled mystery novels (including Forty Whacks, 1941) as Homes, and became a screenwriter for such films as The Big Steal (1949) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). He even wrote for the TV series The Wild Wild West and Mannix. Mainwaring died in 1977 at age 74.

If you can find a copy of Build My Gallows High, read it. Then go see Out of the Past--you won’t be sorry.

READ MORE: “The Unsung Godfather of Film Noir,” by David
Handler (CrimeReads).