books about him myself. I’m not comfortable using viewpoint characters who function within a bureaucracy. For one reason or another, I’ve always felt more comfortable from the point of view of an outsider. I didn’t feel at all sanguine about my ability to render a crooked cop believable, let alone sympathetic.
So I let my imagination play around with Scudder, and then I sat down at a typewriter and began writing a long memo to myself about the man. I decided he was something of a burnt-out case; he had been a cop, had lived with wife and children in the suburbs, and had been both a proficient detective and a man to whom small-scale corruption was a way of life. Then, while thwarting a tavern holdup while off-duty, his ricocheting bullet killed a small child. This led poor Scudder to an agonizing reappraisal of his own life and enough existential angst to drown a litter of kittens. He left his wife and kids, moved into a monastic hotel room in Manhattan, quit the police force, picked up the habit of visiting churches and lighting candles, and became a serious drinker. Occasionally he would earn money as an unofficial and unlicensed private detective, using his contacts in the NYPD and investigating cases with the special sensibilities of a hip and hard-nosed cop.
I wrote three novels and two novelettes about Scudder and took enormous satisfaction in them: I like the books as well as anything I’ve written. They worked, and Scudder worked, because I was able to take a generally sound character idea and transform it into a character who came to life as a projection of the author. I identified strongly with Scudder. For all the apparent difference of our lives and our selves, he and I had any number of underlying aspects in common.
All characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The earth is flat.
The above disclaimer notice, which appeared in the front of Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, brought me an invitation—eagerly accepted, I might add—to join the Flat Earth Society of Canada. My purpose in including the notice was not to proselytize against the globularist heresy, as we Flat Earthers are wont to call it, but to make a point about the disclaimer notices that appear so routinely in so many novels. The statements are generally palpable nonsense; resemblance to persons living or dead is often quite intentional.
Many of the characters with whom we people our fiction are drawn from life, and how could it be otherwise? One way or another, all our writing comes from experience, and it is our experience of our fellow human beings that enables us to create characters that look and act and sound like human beings.
The average reader often seems to think that writers go about snatching people off the streets and bundling them into books with the rapacious fervor of an old-fashioned white slaver. It is as if the characters were stolen from the real world and transplanted bodily into a novel.
Once in a while it very nearly amounts to that. In the genuine roman à clef, where the author presumes to render real events in the guise of fiction, the characters are portrayed as much like their real life prototypes as the author can manage. Thomas Wolfe wrote in this fashion, telling his own story in Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, casting himself as Eugene Gant and his own family as the Gant family. Even so, the Gants inevitably became fictional characters; Wolfe had to invent, to devise. Even a character like Eliza Gant, modeled so faithfully upon his own mother, emerges finally as Wolfe’s interpretation of the woman, as the person he would have been had he been her.
Furthermore, the novelist’s imagination and the novelist’s sense of order work changes upon characters drawn from life. In his autobiographical work, Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood tells of various persons with whom he was acquainted over the years, some
So I let my imagination play around with Scudder, and then I sat down at a typewriter and began writing a long memo to myself about the man. I decided he was something of a burnt-out case; he had been a cop, had lived with wife and children in the suburbs, and had been both a proficient detective and a man to whom small-scale corruption was a way of life. Then, while thwarting a tavern holdup while off-duty, his ricocheting bullet killed a small child. This led poor Scudder to an agonizing reappraisal of his own life and enough existential angst to drown a litter of kittens. He left his wife and kids, moved into a monastic hotel room in Manhattan, quit the police force, picked up the habit of visiting churches and lighting candles, and became a serious drinker. Occasionally he would earn money as an unofficial and unlicensed private detective, using his contacts in the NYPD and investigating cases with the special sensibilities of a hip and hard-nosed cop.
I wrote three novels and two novelettes about Scudder and took enormous satisfaction in them: I like the books as well as anything I’ve written. They worked, and Scudder worked, because I was able to take a generally sound character idea and transform it into a character who came to life as a projection of the author. I identified strongly with Scudder. For all the apparent difference of our lives and our selves, he and I had any number of underlying aspects in common.
All characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The earth is flat.
The above disclaimer notice, which appeared in the front of Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, brought me an invitation—eagerly accepted, I might add—to join the Flat Earth Society of Canada. My purpose in including the notice was not to proselytize against the globularist heresy, as we Flat Earthers are wont to call it, but to make a point about the disclaimer notices that appear so routinely in so many novels. The statements are generally palpable nonsense; resemblance to persons living or dead is often quite intentional.
Many of the characters with whom we people our fiction are drawn from life, and how could it be otherwise? One way or another, all our writing comes from experience, and it is our experience of our fellow human beings that enables us to create characters that look and act and sound like human beings.
The average reader often seems to think that writers go about snatching people off the streets and bundling them into books with the rapacious fervor of an old-fashioned white slaver. It is as if the characters were stolen from the real world and transplanted bodily into a novel.
Once in a while it very nearly amounts to that. In the genuine roman à clef, where the author presumes to render real events in the guise of fiction, the characters are portrayed as much like their real life prototypes as the author can manage. Thomas Wolfe wrote in this fashion, telling his own story in Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, casting himself as Eugene Gant and his own family as the Gant family. Even so, the Gants inevitably became fictional characters; Wolfe had to invent, to devise. Even a character like Eliza Gant, modeled so faithfully upon his own mother, emerges finally as Wolfe’s interpretation of the woman, as the person he would have been had he been her.
Furthermore, the novelist’s imagination and the novelist’s sense of order work changes upon characters drawn from life. In his autobiographical work, Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood tells of various persons with whom he was acquainted over the years, some
Similar Books
