The criminal inside me … and you, too

by David Benjamin

“That’s the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it’s the only difference.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

MADISON, Wis.—It was 1968, the bloodiest year in what came to be loosely termed the counterculture. I had hitchhiked to Chicago on a lovelorn mission that afforded my summertime girlfriend the opportunity to kiss me off, forever—without a kiss, Weeks before, she had stopped writing to me—a hint I should’ve taken. I reached the south side around two a.m., way too early to bang on Cindy’s door and risk the likely wrath of her father. I couldn’t just wander, lonely as a clod, ’til dawn because Chicago’s cops, cruising the streets in their warm cars, were renowned for bracing and battering hairy young people who looked like me.

Fortunately, I encountered a pair of insomniac stoners who invited me to crash in their crib, an upstairs hovel with a lumpy couch. While I struggled to drift off, my hosts smoked weed and fantasized about bringing down the Hancock Tower, Chicago’s most illustrious skyscraper. To prostrate the building along several luxurious blocks of Michigan Avenue, crushing every other building in its earthward collapse, my hosts calculated that an explosive charge detonated strategically at one of its four street-level corners, would be sufficient. Their scheme, growing ever more fanciful and deludedly feasible, kept me half-awake for more than an hour. I chose not to offer any tips of my own because these two shmucks, who’d been kind enough to give me shelter, had neither the means, motive, nor mental capacity to even begin a malign enterprise of such magnitude. These guys didn’t even know why they—or anyone—would want to topple the Hancock. They just found it fun to while away the wee hours plotting to fling a huge, noisy, symbolic middle-finger at Sandburg’s city with the big shoulders.

I recall this idiot discourse because it stirred a place in the back of my mind where lurked a kernel of innate villainy. That stirring has never quieted. Indeed, because I write, I have a harmless outlet for this dark aspect. It turns out that one of the secret joys of being a novelist is the liberation of the criminal inside me.

Most of us have one.

Like Richard Nixon—honest to God—I’m not a crook. But I could be. So could you. Every thinking human being harbors an inner Bonnie, a secret Clyde, a suppressed identity as Arsène Lupin or Willie Sutton. Given the slightest prompt and perhaps a second glass of Mateus, most of us would join merrily and ingeniously enter into a scheme to rob the First National Bank, to steal baubles from the Louvre, to hospitalize a particularly objectionable fellow worker or to assassinate a public figure who offends our sense of civic duty.

Harking to my inner fiend, for example, I began my first novel by murdering local politicians—poisoning one, hanging another from the Town Hall flagpole—in a fictional Massachusetts village.

I’ve been plotting murders and mayhem, devising kidnappings and pulling heists ever since. Recently, a critic compared one of smalltown crime novels to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This is high praise but I might have preferred comparison to Raymond Chandler or Donald E. Westlake, who limned their larcenies with tongue in cheek. It was Chandler who called Los Angeles “a city with all the personality of a paper cup.” And Westlake, in a novel called Somebody Owes Me Money, wrote, “I sat up and the room was full of a man with a gun.”

Westlake’s forté was novels about crime from the criminal’s viewpoint. Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Westlake rolled out stories dark, brutal and chillingly real. The first in this series, The Hunter, was adapted for the screen in 1967 as Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin as Parker the coldblooded master thief, a film that has become a noir classic. But Westlake also wrote comic capers that featured a gloomy and sarcastic but lovable burglar named John Dortmunder, a character who’s been portrayed in the movies by George C. Scott (Bank Shot), Robert Redford (The Hot Rock) and Paul LeMat (Jimmy the Kid).

I could say I was inspired by authors like Chandler and Westlake when I began to plot violent and dastardly enterprises. But I was already pondering how to rob banks and imagining how to terminate my enemies with extreme prejudice before I’d begun to study crime-genre masters like James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Tapping the criminal inside me for creative purposes was not imitation. It was more an instinct, a natural human function like bleeding from a cut or peeking through a curtain at the girl next door. It was “in me,” as John Lee Hooker sang, “and it got to come out.”

So, in my Tokyo novel, Black Dragon, I contrived a series of terrorist bombings that killed dozens of fictional folk, climaxed by an intricate sequence of explosions designed to assassinate the Emperor of Japan. I also introduced a Korean/Australian hitman called Dingo whose murders were so swift and subtle that they conveyed to the admiring reader an air of sanguinary elegance.

In my fiction, I’ve fed readers a veritable barbecue of killing, stealing, robbing and blowing things all to hell. However, for the sake of credibility, my bad guys—whom I often cherish more dearly than my heroes—don’t usually get away with it. The popular fantasy of the perfect crime is a staple premise in both movies and print. But even on film, the antagonist rarely prevails. In The Perfect Murder, in which Michael Douglas reprises Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, the villain’s devious scheme to kill his wife leaves Gwyneth Paltrow still breathing and the wouldbe perfect murderer foiled by one maddening little mistake.

Perhaps the most elaborate depictions of the perfect crime—committed by lovable criminals—are Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean” flicks with George Clooney and Brad Pitt. However, even in these delightfully cerebral capers, there are missteps and crises, with Andy Garcia flicking flies into the ointment. Moreover, although the audience is encouraged not to pay this point much heed, the heists in these films require capital in the hundreds of thousands—even millions—of dollars. It takes lots of money to steal more money. The thief who starts with nothing ends up, almost invariably, with nothing.

Herein lies the essence of both the comic Dortmunder and the dead serious Parker in Westlake’s concoctions. The rare crook who has the brains, experience and sangfroid to plot a successful score needs seed money and a crew. Each new crook added to the mix multiplies the potential blunders that might alter the crime’s execution and expose the criminals. In every crime novel, the lesson eventually conveyed is that for every brilliant Moriarty, there are a dozen morons. No scheme is foolproof and every illicit scheme is infested with fools.

For the crime-novel author, the lingering pleasure is not in the unfolding of the plot but in its unraveling. Sometime in our normal lives, most ordinary non-crooks, if we harbor any imagination, have conceived—just for fun—a diabolical undetectable plan for rifling a jewelry store, blowing a vault, garroting a spouse, poisoning a president. But, as Eliot said, “Between the idea and the reality … Falls the Shadow.” We entertain but fail to execute our darkest fancies because we suspect that knifing the boss might actually feel more creepy than cool, especially if you overlooked the camera in the alley where you killed the son of a bitch.

Making up stories of murder and larceny frees me to set loose the criminal inside me. For anyone else who feels the urge, I suggest this: Lock yourself for safekeeping in the back room at the O.J. Bar and Grill on Amsterdam Avenue, where Dortmunder, Kelp, Murch and Murch’s mom plot their ill-fated capers. You should maybe take along a copy of The Big Sleep … or blueprints of the Hancock Tower.