Elmore Leonard once advised fledgeling authors to not write things readers tend to skip. He meant long descriptive passages and lengthy interior musings. Benjamin Appel’s 1934 crime novel Brain Guy has a lot of both. The narrative is packed with paragraph after paragraph of description and rumination, many of them as long as a page. They’re all stylishly written, though, so maybe Elmore should have added: “Unless you’re really good at that sort of thing.”
His body was host to many disputing beings, walking drunken as if he were striding down some nebulous stairway of dream on queer missions, inevitable, sadistic. His head whirled and it wasn’t from fresh morning but late night, his brain sick from wildness, now, suddenly lucid, or regretful, by turns melancholy, exalted, mournful, stolid. And all these moods knew one union, the walking forward of the body containing them.
That’s stylish writing. It’s also writing that doesn’t tell you as much as it should. If this confident prose moved the story or helped us to understand the character better, we’d like it more. But too often neither happens, which means, even as well written as the book’s long passages sometimes are, they try the patience.
Still, some of Appel’s turns of phrase are epic. In one scene a character is stabbed to death and drops a bottle he’s holding. Appel writes that it fell from the man’s slack fingers and, “the ginger ale ran out from the narrow neck as if it too had been murdered.” All of this clever prose encompasses a nobody-to-somebody crime story that, at its core, could be more compelling, but we may try Appel again. He’s fun to read.
