You, Too, Can't Be Michael Marshall Smith

(This piece was written for the 2007 British Fantasy Convention, at which Michael Marshall Smith was a guest of honour.)

A correspondence-course advertisement appears pretty regularly in listings guides, Private Eye, and similar magazines, perkily headlined WHY NOT BE A WRITER? And if you want to learn how to be a writer but don't trust correspondence courses, most British universities run creative writing courses these days, and there are innumerable workshops and holiday courses, too. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. Not only does it provide useful employment and much-needed supplementary income for the professional writers who give tuition, but every writer of fiction has to learn their craft from the ground up. You don't only need ideas; you must also accumulate a box of tools, and you have to keep them sharp by continual use - by writing your own stuff, and by reading other people's stuff. If these courses can help tyro writers pick up some useful tools and tricks, then good luck to them.

But while the correspondence course ad enthusiastically endorses the joys of the freelance life ('Millions of pounds are paid annually in fees and royalties. Earning your share can be fun, profitable and creatively fulfilling.'), and is garlanded with ecstatic recommendations from graduates, it doesn't mention a crucial factor in the writing for fun, profit and fulfilment equation.

Talent.

In just about every other field of human endeavour, there's an automatic assumption that some people are more talented than others. Not every footballer is paid the equivalent of the national debt of Bolivia; most people agree that Frank Sinatra could hold a tune better than Tiny Tim; I'm pretty sure that Sir Ian McKellen got the Gandalf gig for reasons other than his fetching way with a long white beard. If talent wasn't a factor in sport, we'd all be Olympians. And if talent wasn't a factor in singing, acting, and otherwise generally making a tit of yourself, we wouldn't have all those reality TV shows (there's a downside to everything, including talent).

But there's a curious reticence about the importance of the talent factor in the writing biz. For some reason, writing is believed to be egalitarian, and it's pure spite and snobbishness to assert that some people might be better at it than others. Everyone, the old saw goes, has a novel in them. You, too, according to the ad, can be a writer. But at the risk of sounding like a member of the fabled and shadowy establishment that conspires to keep ordinary people's magnum opuses from the 3-for-2 tables of Waterstone's, I have to tell you that writing is like every other creative process: you can't cut the mustard without at least a smidgen of talent. And talent is not evenly distributed. A great many people don't have any talent for writing at all; a lucky few have it by the bucketload. Without talent, no matter how hard you work as hard on your novel, no matter how many correspondence courses you take or workshops you attend, you won't get within shouting distance of the kind of fluent prose that the talented are able to dash off while still recovering from last night's hangover.

Which brings us to Michael Marshall Smith, who is a writer in the same way that a dolphin is a swimmer. He isn't just pretty good at it: he's a natural.

As far as I'm concerned, Mike's extravagant gifts are shown off to their full extent in his short stories. That's not to put down his novels, which are crammed with vivid characters and knottily intricate plots, effortless riffs and hooks that grab you from the getgo. The opening scene of Only Forward, for instance, where the hero must not only cope with a crippling case of tiredeness, but deal with the aftereffects of an eccentric antigravity device, too. Or the beginning of One of Us, when the hero's alarm clock tracks him down to a bar (booze, and the recalcitrance of machinery are recurrent themes in Mike's fiction: my advice is to treat him like any poet, and never get in a car if he happens to be driving it). And then there's the question of voice. Apart from the jigsaw of dreamscapes of his first, Only Forward (and even those are indelibly imprinted with the texture of American noir movies and novels, most notably the world-weary hero who is no more innocent than his quarry), Mike's novels are set in the USA, and not only feature precise and vivid evocations of American landscapes (the three Straw Men novels are both weirdly unsettling thrillers and fine road novels), but also faultless rendering of American character and dialogue. We're all familiar with American dialogue through novels and films (sorry: movies), but it's not easy for a British writer to get it right. Mike doesn't just get it right: he has perfect pitch.

The three novels written as Michael Marshall Smith (Only Forward, Spares, and One of Us), and the novels he published after he morphed into thriller-writer Michael Marshall, are all conspiracies of one sort or another, in which characters discover that not only is the world not quite what it seems, but they aren't quite who they thought they are, either. As M. John Harrison pointed out in his introduction to the PS Publishing edition of The Vaccinator, it isn't precisely a Philip K. Dick style 'recognition of receding layers of paranoid conspiracy, of which you are the victim', but 'the shattering recognition of what you have been hiding from yourself, just so your world can go on - just so it will still work.' Mike's evocation of the trashiness, ephemerality, and restlessness of much of ordinary American life is not only precise, but imbued with a savage existential despair at its waste and tawdriness. 'You know when you've got nothing in particular to do, nothing to stay awake for?' Stark says (or asks the reader) in Only Forward. 'When your life is just routine and it doesn't feel like it belongs to you, how you feel tired and listless and everything seems like too much effort?' It isn't a rhetorical device, or one of those cute observations that lesser novelists drop into the narrative to make it look profound: no, it's a warning, a wake-up call. All of Mike's novels are wake-up calls. Not just to the characters, but to the readers. They insist that the world should be better than it seems; that it has to be better, in fact, or else we are all doomed, sleepwalkers marching in lock step, pacified by stuff that's really, when you look at it in the right light, from the right angle, no more than junk. There's a good reason why the hero of One of Us is harassed by his alarm clock, or why the hero of Only Forward has so much trouble confusing dreams with reality (and vice versa), or why the villains of the Straw Men trilogy believe themselves to be the only ones wide-awake to reality, and therefore free to do whatever they want to the rest of us.

But I was talking about talent.

Novels, no matter how good they are, can never be perfect. They're long prose pieces with plots that, especially if they are genre novels (and if you triangulate thrillers, science fiction, and horror, and mix in some tender and tough business about human relationships, that's kind of where you'll find Mike's novels), demand the odd piece of business or link that has to be contrived to keep the show on the road. But while novels can never be seamless pieces of prose, every short story has the potential to be practically perfect: every sentence in the best short stories resonate with the joy of creation, flow with their own melting. Mike has written some of the best short stories in the thriller/science fiction/horror niche that he has contrived to make his own, and boy, do they sing and shine.

The best writers not only hook you from the first sentence; they can also find a story in just about anything, because they have a way of looking at the world afresh, a unique and peculiar angle of refraction that irradiates the things and people in it. The narrators of many of Mike's stories are people much like Mike might have been if he hadn't been gifted with the talent thing: white, middle-class professionals living in North London, holding down jobs that require a modicum of creativity, but aren't going to lead anywhere exciting. Many are written in the first person. The tone is generally affable, spiked with sharp observations about the intractable rubbishness of some aspects of modern living and the basic foolishness of human behaviour, but also celebrating the comfort of the ordinary -- the riff on the comforts of a particular Chinese takeaway in 'When God Lived In Kentish Town', the wistful recollection of ordinary married life in 'Dear Alison'. It's something like the patter of a highly accomplished stand-up, in other words, but it is also misdirection. Slowly, the mask begins to slip, to yield glimpses of otherness. The stand-up's jokes begin to cut too close to the bone. His smile shows teeth that are just a little too sharp. There's a smell of sulphur in the air, and too late we realise that the exit doors are locked, or that they don't lead back to the ordinary world, but to somewhere else, the reality that's always underlain our comfortable assumptions . . .

Confounding the reader's expectations is a narrative trick essential to most genre fictions, of course. The hook, the twist, the reveal, the ticking clock, the subtle misdirection: if you have only a little talent but are prepared to work hard, you too can learn how to do this stuff, more or less.

But a large part of Mike's talent is to make this seem effortless. I don't mean of course that his stuff simply pours out of him whole and entire (although it can induce tooth-grinding is lesser or slower writers, like me, to read in the afterward to his collection More Tomorrow & Other Stories that while some of his stories are 'delivered whole, and written in a day', others 'take a little more time.' Like what? Two days?). Anyway, it isn't the speed of composition I'm talking about, but the seamlessness, and the way that old themes are passed through a special magic angle of refraction, and turned into something that not only seems thrillingly new, but lingers in the mind for a long time afterwards.

It takes a special kind of talent to work that kind of magic so consistently. I like to think of it as that little alarm clock from One Of Us, pattering after Mike as he heads off for a well-deserved drink, insistent that he stop what he is doing right now, and get on with his work. Something inescapable that nags at him day and night.

I mean, I wouldn't like to think that the world is so unfair that he actually enjoys or is totally at ease with his profligate gifts.

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