Tuesday, October 2, 2007
By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER
For Dave White of Saddle Brook, detective work isn't elementary; it's at least in middle school.The first-time novelist, whose book "When One Man Dies" hits bookstore shelves today, was an avid Sherlock Holmes reader starting in first grade. But as he grew older, the steel trap of Holmes' famous mind became less attractive to him as a crime fiction fan.
"I got less and less interested in the minutiae of clues, and more and more interested in how people act," said White, who -- incidentally -- teaches at Christopher Columbus Middle School in Clifton. "Once you get involved in people, you get involved emotionally."
Unlike Holmes, White's detective Jackson Donne takes things very personally. The new novel begins with the death of Donne's friend, Gerry Figuora, and takes the reader on a roller coaster through Donne's spotted past and onto his shaky road toward the future.
"If you can detach yourself enough to study the mud on somebody's shoe, then murder becomes almost a math problem," said White. "And if you look at Donne, it's definitely not a math problem."
No algorithms could pull Donne out of the hole he partly digs for himself in love and in his professional life. But it's possible that a curious optimism might.
"I think you're pulling for him because he keeps thinking that there's light out there, and that hope gives you hope, as well," said White. "He's trying to get out of a world that's beating him down, and I don't know if he can or not. I want to find that out as a writer."
White developed Donne as a leading character in his short crime stories, many of which were published in magazines and anthologies. Bill Martin, a bitter older detective who becomes Donne's nemesis in the new novel, is a minor character from those stories, as is Gerry Figuora. The Jackson Donne universe is set in New Jersey, mostly near Rutgers University where White majored in English as an undergraduate.
"I'm a Jersey guy, and I think that's important to the field of books," said White. "Jersey people talk differently and act differently than people in Kansas, and I think that's important to get across in the book."
White's next novel will be another Donne book. As this fictional Jersey becomes more and more fully imagined, he has seen characters mature and become voices in their own right.
Case in point: Bill Martin was nothing but a "bit character" until one day when White began revising "When One Man Dies" for publication.
"[Martin's] voice just kind of sprang into my head, and that's when I just started writing from his point of view," said White. The finished book now features alternating chapters of Donne's perspective in the first person and Martin's perspective in limited third person. Their intertwined back stories bring an "interesting twist" to both of their characters, said White.
But even if Jackson Donne has plenty of history with all the wrong people, he's a fairly young gumshoe at a mere 28 years old, one year older than White himself.
"I wanted to take a quintessential detective character and make him younger," said White. "Just to see if that would change anything. Most detectives you read about are middle-aged and pretty jaded."
For Donne, there is still the possibility of starting fresh, of leaving behind the long nights, the violence and the troubled dames. In fact, at the beginning of the novel, he's attempting to enroll at Rutgers.
Maybe solving crimes isn't elementary, and it's done with middle school. Maybe, in the world of Jackson Donne, it's ready to go to college.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
Copyright © 2007 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment