Jay Randall is the fiction-writing pseudonym of a freelance author who lived in Asia for many years. His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Scientific American, and Newsweek, among many other publications, but his first work of fiction, the story “Midnight Caller,” has only just come out this week. It appears in our current issue (July/August 2024), in the Department of First Stories. The story centers around a student of crime fiction. Its author is obviously very well read in the genre, and in this post he talks about the most essential but most mysterious element behind compelling fiction.  —Janet Hutchings

Many years ago, I ran across a jacket blurb that was unexpectedly rich in meaning. I can’t remember the author of the book or the blurb, but the statement has stuck with me: “[the author] emerges as a second Dreiser—but a Dreiser who can write.”

What a revelation! Theodore Dreiser was an unquestioned giant of American literature, but here was confirmation of my experience of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy—forced upon me when I ran out of reading material in the backwaters of China. Dreiser told a good story, and he understood people, but his sentences were terrible. (I remember that the fat, facing-pages translation of David Copperfield I acquired next came as a colossal relief.)

Since then, I’ve often reflected on what I’ll call the mystery of mastery. I’m guessing most readers of this blog are familiar with the feeling. You start a new book or story and it’s immediately obvious whether or not you’re in capable hands. Sometimes you think you can see why. The guttural, Anglo-saxon verbs that Wallace Stroby, with an unerring sense of rhythm, employs to build the vivid action sequences of The Barbed Wire Kiss, for example. Or the high-octane, rage-fueled brio that Newton Thornburg—a mostly forgotten author I like so well I gave him a cameo in “The Midnight Caller”—brings to Cutter and Bone. Then you see the same thing somewhere else and it just feels clumsy or hackneyed. Maybe it’s your mood.

The greatest mystery, to me, is the mastery of Michael Connelly. Like everyone else, I love his books, whether it’s Harry Bosch or Mickey Haller or Renée Ballard, for their razor-sharp plotting. But his sentences also give me that same feeling of surety I experienced when I cracked open David Copperfield after slogging through Sister Carrie, and I’ve never been able to pinpoint why. For the most part, Connelly purposely eschews “style,” or even its more workmanlike cousin, “voice.” His sentences are the kind you read in a news magazine—albeit a good one, from the days when everybody still read magazines—and yet they’re somehow better than that.

It’s authority, I used to think, his background on the police beat. That and the fact that he never puts a foot wrong. (You’ll never find a clanger of a sentence in one of Connelly’s books.) But then I delved into a few novels by other folks with even stronger claims to their subject, district attorneys and FBI agents turned author and so forth, and it was immediately obvious that real life expertise is good marketing but unconnected to mastery.

Write what you know must be the most misleading and unnecessarily discouraging bit of “craft” advice ever conceived, as well as the hoariest, I’ve decided. Sure, there are masters who have experience—everybody knows that Ian Fleming and John Le Carré were spies, and George V. Higgins was an Assistant U.S. Attorney. They’re the exceptions. Most of the time, when I pick up a novel by a moonlighter or second-careerer, I find the same mistake-free, magazine prose that Connelly uses, but there’s no magic. There’s nothing wrong with it, but there’s nothing right about it, either.

I can’t lay any claim to mastery myself, of course. Too often, I find the same, frustrating lifelessness in my own efforts, and my many failures have given me a true respect for anyone who finishes a book, let alone manages to get one published. How is it that I know it when I see it, yet can’t replicate it, or, dare I hope, am only able to replicate it in tantalizing spurts?

Maybe that’s why those of us who can see it love it so much. We all know somebody who can’t tell the difference between Kem Nunn and—you’ll have to fill in the blank. I promised myself I wouldn’t call anybody out as an unredeemable Dreiser. Surely those poor souls can’t love books the way we do. Or, hell, maybe they can. Maybe they read the way I used to as a kid, when the idea of “craft” had never crossed my mind, with an innocent joy.

I hope that’s true. I’ll never know. It’s a mystery.