My father nourished my love of reading by
bringing books home to me from time to time. Dad wasn’t much of a fiction
reader but he knew how much I enjoyed a good mystery so, for a change of pace, one
day when I was ten or eleven years old, he brought me a copy of “I, the Jury,”
a Mickey Spillane novel. I picked it up and started to read, amazed and
secretly pleased that Dad had given me such an “adult” book. A day or so later,
I had left my book on the coffee table, book marker in place, and Dad happened
to pick it up and read a page. His eyes got wide and he immediately confiscated
the book. No more Mickey Spillane for me!
Back
then, I was disappointed when Dad took my book away but, as an adult, I’ve come
to realize that what intrigued me as a child (probably because it was
“forbidden”) bores me now. When I read a mystery/suspense novel with several paragraphs
or pages of descriptive sexual acts, I find myself skimming over those parts to
get back to the story.
I’m not a prude and I have no problem with a sex scene
and/or “colorful” language if it’s necessary to the plot and, of course, it's perfectly acceptable and even expected in certain types of novels. A steamy romance wouldn't be very steamy without, well, some steam. By the same token, in a book about a street gang, I can't imagine one of the members saying, "Gosh, darn it!" when he's angry. That’s unrealistic and I think fiction should be realistic, believable. But, in my Malone mystery series, I chose not to use
certain words and to leave what happens behind bedroom doors (or anywhere else,
for that matter) to the reader’s imagination. Because, it’s my belief that you can have a good story and still keep it
clean.
