Examining the writing in Sail and The Man Who Liked Dogs

Beginning of Sail:

The fish shook its tail as the knife cut off its head. Red ran out of the two parts and the fluid spread enough to cover the wet red marks where two human hands had failed to hold to the dock edge.
​

This is the opening paragraph of Sail. It's got a serious hook (hah! Nice... a fishing metaphor) and it really draws you in. The opening of The Man who liked Dogs isn't nearly as strong or atmospheric, and I don't think it 'sets the hook' nearly as powerfully.

Oscar Sail wet the palm of his own left hand in the puddle.

The small policeman kept coming out on the dock, tramping in the rear edge of the glare from his flashlight. ​

Second and third paragraphs. I just want to point out the beauty and economy of that image—tramping in the rear edge of the glare from his flashlight. So few words to paint such a good strong picture. It also tells us it's dark, which hasn't been mentioned yet. Dent is amazing at doing multiple things like this with his incredibly minimalistic wordage.

When the small policeman reached Sail, he stopped and gave his hat a cock. He looked down at Sail's feet and up at Sail's head.

The cop said "Damned if you ain't a long drink of water."

Sail said nothing.
​

A couple of things strike me here. How many times has Sail's name already been mentioned? And what a strange enigmatic name, one you won't forget. It also links him with the water and with his boat, which is also called Sail. Odd, and especially for a PI who doesn't want to draw attention to himself and might want to use assumed names at times. It's like if Phillip Marlowe drove around with his name on his licence plate. Also, Dent didn't write anything as drab as 'Sail stood almost 7 feet tall'—instead he got it across through very visual action, starting with the 'small' cop (contrast) cocking his hat. You can see it just like it's a movie. Then the camera moving up Sail's length to finally reveal his face. This embodies film noir aesthetics perfectly. And finally, note the specific metaphor the cop used—a long drink of water. They live on the waterfront and they use water metaphors.

Lester Dent was a man who loved sailing and had a nice yacht of his own that he spent a lot of time on. I think I read that he did some of his writing on it, but I'm not sure. Also, Dent's other most popular creation, Doc Savage, was extremely tall.

Beginning of The Man who liked Dogs:

Let me modify what I said earlier—the very beginning of The Man who liked Dogs is weak. It picks up a bit when he goes in the office, and it continues to pick up as it goes for some ways. As I recall, it then lapses for a while, and almost loses my interest. Here's how it starts:

There was a brand new aluminum-gray Desoto sedan in front of the door. I walked around that end, went up three white steps, through a glass door and up three more carpeted steps. I rang the bell on the wall.

Instantly a dozen dog voices began to shake the roof. While they bayed and howled and yapped, I looked at a small alcove office with a rolltop desk and a waiting-room with mission table scattered with copies of the Dog Fancier's Gazette. ​

Decidedly weaker in terms of terse evocative prose than the beginning of the Dent story. Right off the bat, starting with 'There was" is weak. And it's a little disorienting because at first I thought he was inside the door looking out at the Desoto, but then it becomes clear the opposite is true. And I don't quite get the "I walked around that end"—what end, of what? Of the car? "That end" implies he already said something about an end of something, but he didn't. In fact I get the feeling something was edited out here and not very well patched up.

Once the dogs start in I think it gets stronger. Good word-image (in sound actually) of the noise made by the dogs, done as minimally as in Sail, though there's nothing extra being accomplished here (such as 'the cop tramping in the back edge of the glare of his flashlight' being both an amazing visual and revealing the fact that's it's night-time).

I don't mean to just abuse the Chandler story to lift up the Dent one. At least I don't think I do.

Somebody quieted the dogs out back, then an inner door opened and a small pretty-faced man came in on rubber soles, with a solicitous smile under a pencil-line mustache. He looked around and under me, didn't see a dog. His smile got more casual. ​

An immediately-apparent difference—Dent characterized his main character Oscar Sail, but not the cop, who was described only as small. Here the opposite is true. It's as if we're seeing this through the PI's eyes, seeing what he sees, whereas Sail was done more in objective, as if the 'camera' is floating around and can see him in the scene as well as other people. Though I'm not sure if that holds true throughout the stories or just at the beginning. Plus, so far we don't even know this PI's name.

This secondary character gets some more characterization, mostly done through the way he talks:

"I'm looking for a stolen dog."

His eyes flicked at me. His little soft mouth tightened. Very slowly his whole face flushed. I said:

"I'm not suggesting you stole the dog, Doc. Almost anybody could plant an animal in a place like this and you wouldn't think about that chance they didn't own it, would you?"

"One doesn't just like the idea," he said stiffly. "What kind of dog?"
​

This is told in first person. Sail was done in third, so that at least partly accounts for how Dent was able to write more about what his MC looks like. Both characters are characterized partly through their word choices and manner of speaking. The PI feels more talkative and accomodating, at least here, than Sail did. He was careful to soothe the guy's fears of being a suspect. Of course that allows him to keep the guy talking and cooperating—if he let him be frightened, there'd be no information forthcoming from him. So it could be part of the job, like the little guy's solicitous smile was.

And the guy who runs the dog kennel (or whatever it is) is taking on some character now. He reminds me of Higgins from Magnum PI—small, arrogant, snooty and even a little bitchy. A stark contrast against the cool masculinity of the protag, though that isn't foregrounded at all. It comes across more through his manner and words, and our preconcieved notions of what hardboiled PIs are like. You picture a Humphrey Bogart type.

What I've been discussing is one of the chief aspects of hardboiled writing—this ability to get ideas about inner thoughts and feelings across with some subtlety and grace through the extreme minimalist wording, and often in a strict objective POV.

I neglected to add this, from the beginning of Sail (copied from above):

The fish shook its tail as the knife cut off its head. Red ran out of the two parts and the fluid spread enough to cover the wet red marks where two human hands had failed to hold to the dock edge.
​

The bolded part—this lets you reconstruct what just happened, to some extent anyway. Holy crap! Just a few words in the second sentence of the story, and how powerful it is. So now we get the idea a murder was committed here moments ago, possibly by Sail, or he was somehow involved anyway, and wants to hide the evidence. And we don't learn he's a PI for some ways into the story. It does seem like he's a crook, and quite likely the murderer, for a half-dozen pages or so. And here comes the cop immediately, as he's cleaning the blood up. Gulp! Talk about kicking it off with a bang!

Damn, once again, Dent does double duty. I just realized—we see evidence of a very recently-committed murder, and to cover it up, he cuts off a fish's head. Commits a new killing, as red blood runs and the thing shakes uncontrollably. It's like a re-enactment in miniature of what probably just happened. At the very least, it's a bit of a shock, unless you're a hunter or do some fishing, and witnessing an animal dying (at your hands—IN your hands) is normal to you. So he's using the fish blood to cover up the human blood, and showing us a strange animal re-enactment of the murder itself at the same time.

Possibly triple-duty—? It also makes Sail look more guilty. He's the one 'murdering' the barracuda. Yeah, it's a barracuda. When that's mentioned a page or so in, it changed the whole scene for me. I was picturing a bass or a bluegill. Lol, most of my fishing experience has been in lakes. Barracudas are like three to six feet long (human sized), and their mouths are full of monster snake-teeth. Easily enough blood to do some serious covering-up, unlike the little fish I imagined at first.

My background with Lester Dent (a bonus bit)—

When I was something like 7 or 8 years old, I discovered Doc Savage in B Dalton (or was it Waldenbooks?) at the mall. The whole series was being reprinted in the form of Bantam paperbacks. I was gobsmacked!I loved that they were originally written in the 30s and 40s—you could feel the hardboiled attitude and lingo seeping out of every page. Doc was concieved (by Dent) to be sort of a mix of Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes—a doctor and a savage rolled into one. Over the next five or six years I bought a lot of the books and read the hell out of them—easily at least fifty, probably closer to a hundred. So it's fair to say I absorbed a good deal of Dent's writing as a young'un. Way more than any other writer I was reading. There were a few other writers involved. They all went under the pen name Kenneth Robeson, but Dent wrote the vast majority of the stories, and when he didn't you could always tell. His writing had a power and a pizzazz none of the others did. Sort of like if Spielberg and a few other directors did a series of matinee movies.

When I got older I lost the feel for them—they were written for a young readership, and definitely assembled according to the Lester Dent pulp forumla you can find all over the internet. It all got to feel over-familiar and predictable, and after a while I couldn't stomach reading them anymore. Fast forward a few decades, and here we are, and now when I see snippets of his work, or entire stories, I'm struck all over again by the power and the facility. He does things with his writing, sort of like the way Eddie Van Halen did things with his guitar. And even in the Doc Savage stories I can still feel it, though they're not my can of soup anymore. I remember analyzing a couple of paragraphs in here in a PM a few years ago and being surprized at the depth and subtlety of it, despite that it was made for a youth audience in the pulp magazines, and also despite that parts of it are over-the-top action. Solid skills always show through, whatever the artist may be creating. So I'm really excited to do this analysis.

It strikes me that both stories feel very objective (POV-wise I mean), even though Dogs is written in 1st person. We're supposedly inside the PI's head, but we get no hint of his inner thoughts or feelings (that I recall, but I only read this one once). But then you don't want to get too much access inside the PI's head, otherwise you know everything he knows, and there's no suspense or mystery anymore. Plus they're very opaque characters—a hardened exterior, a lot of experience working for the police or military or wherever they learned their chops, a gruff voice, and the rest is mysterious. But it feels a bit strange being in 1st person and somehow also in objective pov.

Musings on Lester Dent's writing:

Remembering the Doc Savage stories, he always kicked things off with a massive bang—a powerful hook. Usually the first chapter is set in some faraway or exotic locale, a distant country, or maybe a strange part of the states, like the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest or something. We're usually following some poor fool who's about to die, and he or she is being pursued by or is investigating something strange that might be supernatural.* Generally that person is killed—end ch 1. Then ch 2 starts on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building—Doc's headquarters, where he finds out about the strange killing and he ponders briefly, gets some intuition or some clue we aren't privy to, maybe rounds up a couple of his men, and sets off to investigate. The stories were written in objective POV, so no access to anyone's inner thoughts or feelings.

So this is probably why Sail starts off with such a powerful hook, and is written in what I'd call a generally more spectacular fashion than most hardboiled fiction (that I've seen anyway).

* The Doc Savage stories were perhaps the forerunners of Scooby Doo Mysteries, because many of them feature 'supernatural' threats that turn out to be a gang of standard crooks (often led by some strange genius) using some unsual technology that seems supernatural.

Back to Sail

This is shortly after the opening. Sail has stripped off his clothes except for a pair of swim trunks—

Standing in the companion and looking around, his right hand absently scratched his chest. No one was in sight.

He got over the side without being conspicuous.

The water had odor and its normal quota of floating things. The tide was high slack, almost, but still coming in a little.

Sail swam under the dock.
​

Again, so much is contained in these clipped sentences. 'He got over the side without being conspicuous'—several sentences could have been spent on this, explaining how he clambered over the side, hung under the rope, and climbed down it hand over hand or something. None of it is needed. Rather than concentrating on physical actions, it's his inner drive, his need for secrecy at this point, that's emphasized. And it didn't say something on the nose and obvious like 'He didn't want to be seen', or 'sneaking around on the deck...'

This goes to what I said earlier—his inner thoughts and feelings, his emotional states, his drives and desires etc are expressed in deceptively simple language. This happens a lot, and is brilliant for detective pulp fiction, where these short spare sentences are so common. Dent manages to express some of his character's inner life through them almost without your noticing it.

'Standing in the companion and looking around, his right hand absently scratched his chest. Nobody was in sight.' He's looking nonchalant, idle, but is intently checking to see if anybody could see him slip out. Done through showing. The little phrase 'Nobody was in sight' again tells you something from his inner thoughts and feelings, but at no point did the POV slip into interiority, nor did a narrator tell you what he's thinking or feeling—you infer it from his action combined with the 'Nobody was in sight,' which is a bit of telling and almost a cheat in what is apparently a story done in objective POV.

But here's the really good one—'The water had odor and its normal quota of floating things. The tide was high slack, almost, but still coming in a little.' The first sentence is a master class in minimalist imagery. If I wanted to express that idea (that complex of ideas) I'd probably use a full paragraph. The second sentence uses a little specialist lingo—I know what high tide is, but the word slack leaves me blank. That's fine, because again, these guys live on the waterfront. They're fishermen or boaters, the tide is a reality of the life they live every day. They would know these terms and use them all the time. We can infer vaguely what it means. And hearing the terms used like this by the narrator gives a little flavor, a little local color to what's happening.

A sample of Doc Savage

Here's the first Doc Savage book in PDF form:

• The Man of Bronze—Doc Savage #1 @ Reader's Library

And here's the very beginning:

There was death afoot in the darkness.

It crept furtively along a steel girder. Hundreds of feet below yawned glass-and-brick-walled cracks—New York streets. Down there, late workers scurried homeward. Most of them carried umbrellas, and did not glance upward.

Even had they looked, they probably would have noticed nothing. The night was black as a cave bat. Rain threshed down monotonously The clammy sky was like an oppressive shroud wrapped around the tops of the tall buildings.

One skyscraper was under construction. It had been completed to the eightieth floor. Some offices were in use.

Above the eightieth floor, an ornamental observation tower jutted up a full hundred and fifty feet more. The metal work of this was in place, but no masonry had been laid. Girders lifted a gigantic steel skeleton. The naked beams were a sinister forest.

It was in this forest that Death prowled.

Death was a man.​

The main subject of this section is death. It's in the first sentence and the last sentence, and just about everything in between deals with it in some way, when it isn't giving descriptions of the streets and buildings. It starts by immediately stating death is stalking the darkness above New York, and it ends by saying that death is a man. But in between a lot of interesting things are done, a lot of excellent word-smithery. Let me re-post that section, but with the colorful, evocative words highlighted:

There was death afoot in the darkness.

It crept furtively along a steel girder. Hundreds of feet below yawned glass-and-brick-walled cracks—New York streets. Down there, late workers scurried homeward. Most of them carried umbrellas, and did not glance upward.

Even had they looked, they probably would have noticed nothing. The night was black as a cave bat. Rain threshed down monotonously The clammy sky was like an oppressive shroud wrapped around the tops of the tall buildings.

One skyscraper was under construction. It had been completed to the eightieth floor. Some offices were in use.

Above the eightieth floor, an ornamental observation tower jutted up a full hundred and fifty feet more. The metal work of this was in place, but no masonry had been laid. Girders lifted a gigantic steel skeleton. The naked beams were a sinister forest.

It was in this forest that Death prowled.

Death was a man.​

Each of these bolded words or phrases evoke something fearful, monstrous, or directly evoke a sense of death somehow. This is some good writing, filled with these little words that pop out and strike powerful imagery into the mind of the reader, even if you aren't aware of it.

This is what I mean when I say Lester Dent likes to kick off his stories with a serious bang.

Also, by opening and closing this section with the idea of Death, he gives a sense of closure to it. It feels like a completed loop, but more than that. Originally Death seemed to be no more than an abstract concept. But in the end it's understood that death is a man, someone come here to hunt somebody. So we've made some pregress. The closed loop doesn't just end where it began, it lets us off knowing more than when we got on. It has a sense of forward movment.

If you read a little more, it keeps up like this. Dent drops these evocative nugget-words in now and then to paint a picture with some powerful emotional content.