I finally sat down and read the 15-part serial novella “Doors Open” by crime writer Ian Rankin that has been published in the NY Times Sunday magazine over the past several months. It’s a tad under 40,000 words, 2500 words per installment. Michael Connelly did the same thing with his story The Outlook and later stated that he found the format restrictive because each chapter had to be almost exactly the same length. That meant he had to trim some chapters and pad out others. After the whole story was published, he went back and re-edited the material into a short novel.
Rankin is best known as the creator of Inspector Rebus, who keeps the mean streets of Edinburgh a little less mean. He abandons Rebus for this standalone story, a caper where three friends decide to beat back the mid-life doldrums by engaging in a little grand larceny. The main character, Mike Mackenzie, is under 40 but he sold his dot com and is now independently wealthy, and bored. A dangerous combination. In his retirement, he’s become interested in art. The story title is a play on the saying “when one door closes, another one opens” as well as on Edinburgh’s Doors Open Day, when galleries throw open the doors to rarely seen parts of their collections.
The writing is crisp and engaging, the ending inevitable, though it seemed to me that the last chapter was rushed and truncated, like the author wanted to go for just a little bit more but he didn’t have the room for it. An enjoyable enough story, wherein the innocent and the guilty all get thrown into the same box and shaken up. There’s a gangster who’s a lighter version of Rankin’s Big Ger Cafferty and a Hell’s Angel who goes by the name of Hate, a love interest or two, enough greed to go around and dishonor, of course. Always dishonor in capers.
I made it to the end of the manuscript this morning. Still hovering around 4900 words. Now I have to print it off and take a big picture cut at it before going back over each and every word. I think the structure’s basically there now. It’s a matter of filling in some details to add depth and color. I discovered the real reason why the character is where he is a few days ago, and it came as something of a surprise to me.
I watched a bit of The Power of Ten last night to see if the Big Brother contestants would be on it, but they weren’t. Drew Carey is engaging enough, but I wish they wouldn’t stretch these game shows out to the level of tedium. I like Jeopardy. Ask a question, get an answer, don’t dither. (Or, in the Jeopardy case, give an answer, get a question, don’t dither.) No more of this polling your friend, the audience, total strangers, the populace of lower dunno-istan. I think there are more questions and answers in one episode of Jeopardy than there are in two weeks of The Power of Ten.
