A Darker Shade of Blue

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‘Crime seldom pays,’ wrote James Crumley, ‘love seldom works. Thankfully stories, like fishing, occasionally work. In ways inexplicable.’ I don’t know about the fishing; but about stories, as he was about a number of things, Jim had it right. ‘Inexplicable.’

I remember reading one of the earlier Charlie Resnick stories at a short story seminar somewhere in the States and being confronted by a puzzled writing student afterwards: I loved your story, she said, but it did all the things we’ve been taught not to do.

Well, yes.

If I lined up a bunch of my favourite writers of short fiction and tried to use their work to make a template for the perfect story, it just wouldn’t happen. How to match Hemingway with Katherine Mansfield; Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore with the Socrates Fortlow stories of Walter Mosley or the evocations of mining life in D. H. Lawrence; the southern Ireland of John McGahern with the Wyoming of Annie Proulx — for that matter, the Raymond Carver stories before they were heavily edited by his mentor, Gordon Lish, or after?

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