ELIZABETH'S HUSBAND ON THE REAL WORLD AND POPULAR FICTION

On the Third Day of Christmas...

Whether holiday or everyday, each family has its own customs. In ours, family dinners and conversations are a treasured custom. Because we have diverse minds and peculiar interests, conversation is lively, to say the least. From those conversations have come the backdrop of my recent books.

In effect, Evan has become the research arm of Two of a Kind, Inc., our company. His fascination with transnational crime, failed states, feral cities, and non-state actors (private corporations or individuals) has become mine.

So much of the modern world doesn’t make the headlines.

Too much of it affects our lives in unsuspected ways.

St. Kilda Consulting, the new Elizabeth Lowell “series,” is about the rest of that iceberg.

Meet the ice breaker, my husband and sometime co-author Evan Maxwell, the best present I ever found under any tree!

(You'll note that there isn't a question at the end of the blog. Don't be shy. By now, we shouldn't have to always coax input.)

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People in the main-stream media (MSM) seem to be tumbling to the fact that our world has changed, radically, in the past decade. Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review crime fiction reviewer, recently wrote that she was amazed how many mystery writers were injecting elements of international intrigue into their stories.

Since she likes regional and small-canvas mysteries, she didn’t care much for the trend. After all, it’s hard to put your lead character into an international thriller if he/she is a meter-reader in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She allowed as how some authors get away with it but she was skeptical about the value of the exercise in general.

I suggest that the trend is real and irreversible.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a whole new world out there for us to write about in popular fiction. It’s a dangerous world with a host of new and inventive characters, both heros/heroines and villains. The settings can remain cozy and domestic, but they are linked to a much bigger and more complex world. And the crimes that are at the heart of these mystery/suspense/thriller stories are incredibly more threatening than the old, plain-vanilla murders that Sam Spade and Ross MacDonald solved.

In short, we are, as writers and as citizens, living in a screwball, high-tension, fast-paced world populated by average citizens, clever politicians, power-hungry executives of multinational corporations, renegade warlords with their own private militias, transnational crime bosses whose minions can jump out of closets in a dozen countries and start shooting, and finally, megalomaniacal messiahs who love to foment chaos just for the pure nihilistic hell of it.

And as a writer/researcher who loves to concoct storylines with some connection to contemporary problems, all I can say is, “Bring it on!”

I first began to sense the changes in the geo-political possibilities about the time I discovered this grand new time-sink called the World Wide Web.

Now, the Web is a menace to civilization, of that I am sure. But it’s here to stay and we can’t afford to pretend that it isn’t. When I first got an ISP address, I found myself flitting like a bumblebee on crystal meth from subject to subject, linking and Googling and jumping from arcane new subject to more arcane new subject.
I discovered blogs and bloggers whose minds were truly demented, in a constructive way or not. I discovered search engines that took me deeper into subjects than I should have gone. Surfing is a kind of narcotic high. It has changed the way we connect to one another and to the bigger world.

But over time, I found myself circling closer and closer to a set of subjects that seemed important to me. As a professional journalist, I was always fascinated by the ways the criminal underworld and the belle monde of polite society intersect. And as a novelist with my wife, I tried to explore those connections more deeply and entertainingly than I could as a reporter.

The Web did nothing to discourage that interest. In fact, the free-form research firm of Google, Dogpile & Internet Exploder exposed me to ideas and authors I never would have encountered in the stacks of the largest research library in the world. I found myself reading long, thoughtful papers by professors at the Army War College and short, waspish blog entries by former spooks and spies dismayed by the trends they saw in national and international politics.

Even before 9/11, I began reading open-source analyses of global Jihadi movements, criminal cartels strong enough to destabilize sovereign countries, and international gun-running operations that took payment for their deadly wares in diamonds, rare minerals and airplanes loaded with exotic tropical hardwoods.
I discovered writers who believed that the shattering of the Old World Order in the 1990s would lead, indeed was leading, to a New Medievalism, where the old-form nation-states were being challenged by all kinds of NSAs, non-state actors.

(I know, I know, it’s a new jargon, but it has meaning. “NSA” is a name that can be applied to anything from international charity groups like Oxfam and the Red Cross to private military companies like the ones who now have 20,000 gunslingers engaged in various jobs in Iraq. An NSA can be a private militia in need of modern arms and munitions. It can be an extended network of Mongolian clans who live in yurts and drink yak milk. It can even be a cult like Aum Shinrikyo, which was the first NSA to mount an attack with a weapon of mass destruction--Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system--against civilian targets for no discernible political reason except that they could.)

This basic concept, the non-state actor, is a way of describing the new players and the new landscape of the 21st Century. We are living amid failed states, feral cities and no-go zones that are beyond any government’s control. In short, we live in a world where violence and political power are not the sole purview of states with their armies, police forces and civil controls.

One day while searching the Web for more signposts to the future, I ran across a passing reference on the Web that was almost as compelling as NSA. An essay by a retired colonel named Max Manwaring, described the concept of “4G Warfare,” a term he defines as the way weak forces wage war against strong ones.

This may seem like really turgid stuff, probably interesting only to an old political science major who has spent too much time dreaming up plot lines for crime fiction. But for me, 4G Warfare was a way of ordering the world of conflict and criminality which is, after all, the backdrop lots of us genre writers use for our stories.

My impulse to follow this thread is powerful because once, fifteen years ago, I had a similar epiphany. By chance, I attended a series of law enforcement seminars on the then-new field of forensics, scientific crime fighting. I said to myself, “Wow, there’s a mystery franchise here.”

I started dabbling in blood splatter analysis and criminal profiling. I was just getting rolling on a plot line when Patricia Cornwell introduced Kay Scarpetta into the popular vernacular. Figuring there was only room for one forensics crime fighter in the genre, I abandoned the idea.

(Shows how little I know.)

So it's not surprising that another ground-breaking concept, the idea of new generations of iterations of warfare, really smoked my brain. The blending together of military action with crime fighting and counterterrorism was invigorating. The possibility that new rules apply to the age-old game of money, power and violence made my hair stand on end.

But it rang true. How else, for instance, can you understand what’s going on in Iraq, where religious factions and militias traffic in stolen oil as a means of financing attacks against American soldiers and where, at the same time, jihadis supported by oil billionaires attack everybody in an effort to destroy all order so they can start over again to create their own caliphate? Fourth Generation warfare, or its relatives 5G and 6G, are the best way I have discovered to describe what is happening around us.

And in case you think such things have no relevance in the comfortable old United States, think again.
Think, for instance, about the US/Mexico border, the world’s longest running joke, where Zeta--armed groups of former Mexican Army special forces crime fighters--now operate on both sides of the line in behalf of drug traffickers. Yes, they kill in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, too.

And they get away with it.

Think, too, about the number of neighborhoods in Los Angeles and many other cities where police no longer claim to be in control.

Or think, if you will, about your local bank, which may well be/become a money-laundering institution in behalf of the Russian Mafiya, the CIA or some innocently-named Islamic charity that pours funds into training new hijackers or modern-day Malay pirates.

We don’t have the old duality, the cold-war struggles that provided story lines for Fleming, LeCarre, Deighton and Helen MacInnes. What we have is a much more splintered world where the threats and the forces to counter those threats are being invented as you read this.

Or maybe someone already invented it. A popular fiction writer. The other day I ran across a blog entry by one of the 4G experts which directed me to a seminal American crime novel, Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles.

In this novel, the hero, an operative for the Continental Detective Agency, is sent to a city to investigate a single murder. As he digs deeper and deeper, he finds himself involved in a chaotic mélange of organized crime, law enforcement, and both local and national politics. He gets his head busted a couple of times and finally gets mad enough that he decides to clean up the whole mess.

How does he do it? He pits the several gangs against one another and against the police and the politicians. There is an absolute donnybrook, a kind of 6G war of all against all. And soon enough, justice and peace prevail once again because the antagonists have pretty much killed one another off.

Now that’s modern warfare, friends, and Red Harvest was written in 1929.

So now you have some idea of where the recent Two of a Kind/Elizabeth Lowell stories have come from. It’s my—and my wife’s—way of saying that we believe that writers and readers of fiction can learn about the way the world really is, and enjoy that learning.

We decided that if we are going to write stories that have some relevance to today’s world, we have to shift our frames of fictional reference to accommodate the new realities. The heroes and heroines of the stories that Elizabeth Lowell writes live in that chaotic new world; and often, they begin their journey every bit as lost as you and I sometimes feel.

But her characters learn and experiment and fight back against some odds that are pretty stiff. In the process, those characters often find other like-minded souls willing to engage in the ongoing struggle to bring order out of chaos.

Because this is fiction, popular fiction, the hero/heroine usually wins, although not always in the ways you might expect.

That willingness to fight is, after all, the very basis of heroic action, and we hope these stories convince readers to act as heroically as possible.

If they don’t, the world is, indeed, in trouble.

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In addition to 20 years as a crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times, Evan Maxwell has collaborated on many novels with his wife (sometimes as A. E. Maxwell), as well as written two novels under his own name, ALL THE WINTERS THAT HAVE BEEN and SEASON OF THE SWAN.