Noir on the Radio and the W.H.O.C.A.R.E.S. Method of Writing

Story’s where you find it.

In the crazed hodge-podge atmosphere I grew up in, Hollywood in the 1970s, story came at you from every corner—on Sunset Strip billboards and religious pamphlets strewn across the stars on the Boulevard, bus bench ads and porno newspaper bins and goofy reruns and “Whatever Happened To” paperbacks sold on the Woolworth’s rack.

(6 Rules of Writing a Clearing-Your-Own-Name Mystery.)

My first inkling of what a story could really be came from old-time radio mysteries traded through SPERDVAC, aka the Society to Preserve Early Radio Vaudeville and Comedy. My mom’s colleague hipped me to SPERDVAC when I was 7 or 8—the organization put out a stapled mimeograph you could get in the mail for free, then you’d check boxes and exchange reel-to-reels with the fanatics who collected them, all through the US Mail. While still in elementary school, I got hooked on crackling episodes of Dragnet and Vincent Price’s The Saint, mesmerized by the breakneck pace, the screeching cars and sudden gunfire, the tough guys and slick dames, and the supercool way everyone talked like they were in a rush to get at the truth.

Then, at 9 or 10, I was gifted with a legit radio—an aqua-blue transistor beauty with 9v battery. Now I was plugged into a new story place, a modern place where it seemed like the whole city got collectively hypnotized without ever quite knowing or acknowledging it: through hit songs.

The AM Radio Storytelling Machine

In the second half of the ‘70s, listening to 93KHJ and Ten-Q, every song seemed to tell a secret story, if only you could divine it—“On and On,” “The Year of the Cat,” “Baker Street,” “Margaritaville,” “Rhiannon.” Even a syrupy love jingle like “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” seemed to shuffle out a series of fractured images about a real couple somewhere—maybe he worked at a Rent-A-Car dealership, maybe she had a macrame potted plant hanging from the ceiling, maybe once they’d been in love but now they were estranged, and their awkward phone call was enough to make a kid blush.

For us kids, AM radio was a secret line into the way grown-ups really lived.

Then, right around the time I turned 13, punk rock hit Los Angeles like a 7.0 earthquake and all at once these two worlds collided—the pop song and the noir radio mystery. Punk songs, especially the ones written by locals, were about something else—“Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” “Nothing Means Nothing,” “Nervous Breakdown,” “Dragon Lady”—this was tougher, realer, desperate lives and last-ditch attempts, the same underworld of lost souls you’d hear about on the old radio shows.

Totally entranced, I took my bar mitzvah money and started a fanzine called Rag in Chains. I never fancied myself an expert on punk or anything else—all I knew was the songs were talking to me and I had to talk back. I printed a hundred copies of the first issue, xeroxed and stapled, and sold it at the cool stores on Melrose Avenue for 50-cents a pop.

Rag in Chains #4

Inside a summer, I graduated from my own ‘zine to write for Flipside Fanzine, then the LA Weekly, but almost immediately the formal role of “pop critic” felt like a poor-fitting jacket. Pop critics wrote about the bands, the history, musicianship, gossip, the cultural context—fair enough. But what I longed to know about were the people in the songs themselves, to connect “the heap of broken images” that were making stories in my head.

At 16, inspired by Bukowski’s “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” I pitched a column to the LA Weekly about the foibles of my day-to-day called “High School Confidential.” To my surprise, the editors bit, and the column was a hit, a ramble of anecdotes and street incidents, sometimes scrawled at a bus bench.

But meanwhile, behind the scenes, I privately chipped away at my true ambition—to write a full-length mystery like the kind I’d heard on the radio, the kind I’d been reading from Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald. At a Sears electric typewriter, deploying the pseudonym Dexter Fuel, I penned Lovebeads & Guns starring an insanely cliché hardboiled P.I. who’s given the task of tracking down a teenage runaway in the throes of an LSD freakout.

Love Beads & Guns cover

I didn’t make it past chapter three.

Years passed. I tried to write a mystery again and again, at 26, 37, 42, but it would take me 40 years—40 years!—to write a publishable mystery. What the heck took so long?

The W.H.O.C.A.R.E.S. Method

For one, as much as I loved the masters, I just couldn’t write “hardboiled” because I didn’t feel “hardboiled.” On the contrary, I was a softy and a song junkie, porous, crazier, more emotional, way more full of confusion and ambivalence than the tough guys I admired. Like so many young writers, I could not yet dare to put my true self into the mix.

I also needed something that only comes with age—a sense of consequence. Fiction, if it’s any good at all, is the art of consequence.

Over decades, I read every kind of story I could get my hands on, from the most forgotten crumbling genre paperbacks to the high-lit classics, and I pored through an embarrassing number of craft books. After a while, certain basics rose to the surface. I came up with a little mnemonic device, a metric to help make sure all elements were driving toward consequence.

I call it the WHOCARES Method.

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Every scene, no exception, needs Want, Hunger, Obstacles, Conflict, Action, Resolution, Emotion, and the Senses.

The Want is the goal, the solve or truth your detective is after. Whereas the Hunger is the secret yearning driving him or her, the roiling fantasies that are what we’re really made of—the songs in your heart. Things really get cooking when Want and Hunger are at odds.

Obstacles, Conflict, Action, and Resolution are pretty clear to any student of fiction, but Emotion and the Senses are harder to pin. One thing about Emotion—the strongest feelings are stirred in negative space. What I mean is, as readers, it seems that we feel most when the writer doesn’t express it direct. Strangely enough, that goes for songs on the radio, too.

Then there are the five Senses—which is really just code for experience. The cool thing about fiction on the page is that all five can get in on the action.

With the W.H.O.C.A.R.E.S. Method on my side, I was finally able to fashion a detective who is more like me. Lyft driver and failed songwriter Adam Zantz is a radio dreamer and a softy who thinks up lyrics on the fly, rewrites the hits like so many of us do, and uses the Jukebox Id—the songs that poke up out of your unconscious—to help guide him.

Most of all, he solves crimes with his heart as much as his head. Or, as he puts it, “I’m about as hardboiled as scrambled eggs.” 

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