IN REMEMBRANCE

Posted on February 21, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen

On February 12, 2018, Bill Crider, someone who wore nearly every hat in the mystery field—author, critic, columnist, reviewer—died in Alvin, Texas, after an eighteen-month battle with cancer.

I’ve known Bill since 1990, when I bought the first book in his Truman Smith series (a book that went on to be nominated for the Shamus Award for best first P.I. novel) for the mystery line at Walker Books. When you consider Bill’s incredible output—a half-dozen different mystery series (comprising more than forty books), plus at least sixteen standalones in genres outside the mystery, from horror to western to adventure, and five children’s books—what stands out like a beacon is his modesty about it all. In a world in which self-promotion has become not only the norm but a necessity, I don’t think I ever heard Bill, a multiple Anthony Award winner, offer an unsolicited word about his own work. He knew about everyone else’s work, though; he was a superfan, with one of the largest collections of mystery and crime fiction that’s ever come to my attention. That’s what made him a perfect fit for our Blog Bytes department, which attempts to bring focus to the crowded universe of crime-fiction blogs and websites: Even before he took over that column from Ed Gorman in 2007, Bill was in the habit of scouring websites and blogs for every bit of information he could find about mystery books and authors, old and new. He knew the genre from every angle, having written his doctoral dissertation on the hardboiled detective novel (which launched his career as a college professor) and later trying his hand successfully at every subgenre of the mystery, from his Sheriff Dan Rhodes whodunits to his Truman Smith P.I. novels to spy fiction to suspense.

Bill Crider’s work has been so interwoven with my own career in mystery fiction that it will take time to process his absence. But it is the stalwart friendship Bill and his wife Judy (who died in 2014) provided over more than a quarter century that I will miss most—far more than his excellent columns and books and stories, though, like his many other fans, I will miss those too, especially the distinctive, laid-back humor so evident in most of his fiction.

One of my fondest memories of Bill and Judy Crider is from the early 1990s, when I attended a writer’s conference in Houston, not far from their home in Alvin, Texas. We had a free afternoon and they used it to show me around Houston, taking me to Murder by the Book, Houston’s premier mystery bookshop, where I met author Dean James for the first time, and to the Central Spy Shop, an entire store filled with surveillance devices, bulletproof vests, and every kind of James Bond-type gadget you can imagine. (I just Googled the store and it’s still in business.) After that we saw each other nearly every year at Bouchercon, meeting for meals, sightseeing in cities such as St. Louis, where, with Judy still well, we walked for miles and went up the Gateway Arch, and finally, in 2017, in Toronto, where Bill (attending with his daughter Angela, who is also a contributor to EQMM) spoke at the convention’s EQMM celebration.

Bill and Judy, and then Bill alone, have always been such an important part of what made the mystery community my community that I wonder what it’s going to be like without them. But of course, I am not alone. They will be missed and remembered with fondness and affection by countless friends, acquaintances, and fans. And as I told Bill only a few weeks ago, I think not only his memory but his writing will endure. That it will be read by ardent fans of the next generation, people who have the same kind of interest he had in searching out the voices that helped to define other times and places in the history of the genre we love.—Janet Hutchings

L to R: Janet Hutchings and Judy Crider. Photo by Bill Crider.

L to R: Bill Crider and Angela Crider Neary. Photo courtesy of Dana Cameron. Taken at Bouchercon 2017.

Posted in Memorial | 10 Comments

“Poster Child” (by Michael Bracken)

Posted on February 14, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Michael Bracken is the winner of two Derringer Awards for his short fiction, and in 2016 he received the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement in Short Mystery Fiction. That award has special significance in regard to this author, for Edward D. Hoch wrote nearly 1,000 published short stories in his distinguished career, and Michael Bracken has actually exceeded that number at 1,200. His post for us today reminds us of all the markets for short fiction our genre has offered over the years, and continues to offer today. We hope it will inspire new writers to work in the field of short mystery fiction. Michael’s next story for EQMM, “Wishing Tree,” will appear later this year.—Janet Hutchings

At the 2017 Bouchercon in Toronto, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was celebrated for its “Distinguished Contribution to the Genre.” Art Taylor interviewed editor Janet Hutchings, and then fifteen special guests each spent a few minutes describing their relationship with the magazine.

I was one of the special guests.

From the time I accepted the invitation to participate until shortly before the convention, I found myself stumped. My connection to EQMM is tenuous, at best. I co-authored, with Tom Sweeney, a single story published within its pages (“Snowbird,” December 2007). By contrast, the other special guests had been published in the magazine multiple times, and at least one had written for all three of the magazine’s editors.

So, when my turn came, I joked about being the group’s redheaded stepchild, invited to represent all the one-hit wonders, the writers who only ever placed a single story (or, in my case, half a story) in the magazine. And I wasn’t joking when I noted that my half-sale to EQMM means so much that I’ve featured it in every author bio ever since.

I began writing professionally in the late 1970s and saw my first mystery short story published in a men’s magazine in January 1983. In the early 1980s, three mystery magazines—Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine—shared space on the magazine racks with a plethora of science fiction and fantasy magazines. Before the end of the decade, two additional magazines joined them—Espionage Magazine and The Saint Magazine—but they, along with Mike Shayne, did not survive into the 1990s.

Since then, at least sixty-six mystery periodicals have come and mostly gone. (Sixty-six seems like a great many, but I’m certain I’ve missed several more because I’ve only included in my count the few that have published my stories and the great many who have rejected them.) Though a few of these publications mixed fiction with nonfiction, and a few mixed genres, placing crime fiction alongside horror or science fiction, the majority were home to multiple short mystery stories each issue.

Some, such as Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, were named after famous writers and backed by major publishing companies. Some, such as Argosy, Black Mask, New Black Mask Quarterly, and The Strand, revived magazines of the past. Others were the literary equivalent of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movie characters putting on a show in the barn, published by mystery fans and funded with pocket change.

Crime and Mystery feature prominently in many of the titles: Crime Factory, Crime Syndicate, Crimestalker Casebook, Crimewave, Detective Mystery Stories, Flash Bang Mysteries, HandHeldCrime, Kracked Mirror Mysteries, Mysterical-E, Mystery, Mystery Forum, Mystery Street, Mystery Time, Mystery Tribune, Mystery Weekly, New Mystery, and Whispering Willow Mysteries. Weapons—Heater, Needle, Plots With Guns, Shotgun Honey, Switchblade—feature in several titles, while color brightens others: Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Blue Murder, Crimson Streets, Malone’s White Fedora, Noirotica, Red Herring Mystery Magazine, and White Knuckles. Then there’s a potpourri of other titles: A Different Beat, Action Magazine, All Due Respect, Betty Fedora, Big Pulp, Down & Out: The Magazine, The Flash Fiction Offensive, Futures, Hardboiled, Hardluck Stories, Judas, M, Mayhem, Mean Streets, Murderous Intent, Murdaland, Naked Kiss, Out of the Gutter, Over My Dead Body!, Pirate Writings, Pulp Adventures, Pulp Magazine, Skullduggery, Sleuthhound, Spiderweb, Story and Grit, The Back Alley, TheCase, Thrilling Detective, Thuglit, Tough, and Without a Clue.

The many and varied mystery periodicals that have come and mostly gone were home to the first publications of many of today’s mystery writers—a handful of my earliest stories appeared in Espionage Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine—and today’s publications offer similar opportunities to tomorrow’s mystery writers.

Though periodicals launched as recently as two decades ago were exclusively print publications, today’s publishers experiment with and attempt to harness new technology. Mystery publications today are presented as websites, as blogs, as PDF files, as emailed newsletters, and as print-on-demand journals, and many utilize a mix of media to reach their audiences. Even stalwart print publications AHMM and EQMM offer electronic editions and connect with fans through their websites, blogs, and social-media accounts.

In many ways, new technology has created a renaissance in short mystery fiction. For those of us who love to read (and to write) short mystery fiction, we haven’t seen this much opportunity and variety in quite some time. Though it can be difficult to find the new publications—unlike the days of my youth when a single newsstand carried all of the mystery magazines and the most difficult thing I had to do was push the science fiction magazines out of the way—it is always worth the effort to seek out new publications and new writers.

And yet, despite all the opportunities provided by all the publications that have come and mostly gone, those of us who aspire to careers as writers of mystery short stories strive to appear in the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

Why?

Because they endure.

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, launched in fall 1941, is the longest-running continuously published mystery magazine, older than most of us who write short mystery fiction. To be a part of the magazine’s history—even as small a part as the one I’ve played—connects us to fans, to fellow writers, and to the genre as a whole in a way that appearing in no other publication does (though appearance in AHMM, the second-longest-running mystery publication, comes close).

So, with my half-story in EQMM, I’ve secured my place in mystery history.

And if that weren’t enough, I learned after preparing my presentation for Bouchercon 2017, but before leaving home for the convention, that I won’t much longer be the poster child for EQMM’s one-hit (and half-hit!) wonders.

I have another story scheduled for publication within the year.

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Conventions, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, Magazine | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

“From Noir to Golden Age” (by Carlos Orsi)

Posted on February 7, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Carlos Orsi is a Brazilian writer and journalist with three novels and five short-story collections published in Portuguese. His work first appeared in EQMM in the July 2014 issue, translated for our Passport to Crime department by Cliff Landers. Since then, we’ve learned that the author has a wide range as far as genre; he writes in the mystery, fantasy, horror, and science-fiction fields and has twice won the Argos Award for best science fiction short story published in Brazil. He’s equally versatile when it comes to language, writing fluently in English as well as in his native Portuguese. His work written in English includes stories for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies and for Mystery Weekly. His new story for EQMM, his first English-language original for us, will appear in our May/June issue. It’s a locked-room mystery in the Golden Age tradition, even if, in atmosphere, it has a slight touch of noir. —Janet Hutchings

I would like to tell you about my intense love affair with Golden Age–style mysteries. I say “Golden Age–style” because I see the Golden Age of Mystery more as a state of spirit than as a period in time, the famously defined interval between the two World Wars of the twentieth century. For me, Soji Shimada, or even Anthony Horowitz of the Magpie Murders, are as “Golden Age” as Agatha Christie and Edmund Crispin.

If I were to try to define this spiritual space, I’d mention an air of serious playfulness; a bold disregard for external plausibility (internal plausibility, however, is a must); a tension between logic and absurdity, with logic finally emerging from the absurdity, as a hero rescued at the last second; and, as far as possible (without spoiling the fun), fair-play towards the reader.

This is a love that came late in my life: I am pushing 50, and my conversion came only in the last decade, when I struggled, amazed, with the third (or fourth?) brilliantly false solution of Ellery Queen’s The Greek Coffin Mystery. For comparison, the first time I recall saying to someone that I wanted to be a crime writer I was just 11 years old.

This late blossoming may perhaps be explained by Brazilian literary culture (I was born, raised, and still live in Brazil). Cultures, literary or otherwise, are complex and multifaceted creatures, so any generalization is bound to be, to some extent, unfair and open to counterexamples.

But, painting the picture with a very large brush and somewhat bold brushstrokes, one could define the Brazilian literary culture, at least since the Modernist movement of the early 1920s, as viciously antagonistic to all kinds of genre writing.

To be considered as literature at all, novels and stories ought to stretch the boundaries of the written language, or to lay bare the cruelty and unfairness of society, or to expose the Freudian scars of the writer’s deranged mind; if a book could do all three at the same time, it would be a masterpiece.

I won’t dispute the fact that many masterpieces were written in this vein, but the attitude also had the effect of pushing genre writing, in almost all of its forms—science-fiction was “crap”, fantasy was “for children”—to the very boundaries of the literary system, and often to toss it out completely.

Crime and mystery were given a kind of double citizenship, though: The murder of someone or the disappearance of something could give a slim thread of coherence to a novel that, otherwise, would be just a jumble of smart-ass musings, and crime breeds paranoia, which sounds Freud-ish. Besides, noir and hardboiled texts often had that “cruelty and unfairness of society” vibe. So, mystery, even if somewhat narrowly defined, got its passport to the Land of the Literati.

To read Raymond Chandler wasn’t as impressive as reading James Joyce, but it was cool enough to discuss with the other literary wannabes of the college in the bar, after class, without people snickering at you.

So, that was the climate in which I came to be a mystery fan and as an aspiring mystery writer. Things had to be dark, hard, cynical. The plot, just an excuse for some fancy footwork in the form of first-person narration and dismal personal insights. Mystery for mystery’s sake, the plot as a problem to be solved, preposterousness and playfulness as goals? Come on, those were old, tired cliches: so much naivete!

But I have a weakness for logic—I spent some twenty years trying hard to write hard science fiction!—and, even if I am as liable as the next guy to be engrossed and hypnotized by fancy first-person narrative footwork, for me, at least, it got tiresome.

As far as cliches go, in my eyes Philip Marlowe became one even bigger than Hercule Poirot; come on, John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell is a much more original character than almost every single wisecracking, raincoat-wearing, hard-as-nails private dick or alcohol-haunted ex-cop you ever saw (or read about). And (spoilers ahead!) the beautiful damsel in distress who really is the mastermind behind every piece of mischief might have been original in “The Maltese Falcon,” clever in “The Big Sleep”, funny in “I the Jury,” but . . . Please. Enough is enough. Then, the overt darkness and cynicism started to feel flat, too. Most of it began to sound like relapsing teenager angst, masquerading as depth.

In view of all of this, the old “realism” card, the engine behind the polemic between Raymond Chandler and Carr, in which Chandler decreed the Golden Age dead and buried, became harder and harder to sustain. (If you are curious about the arguments of both authors, I recommend “The Simple Art of Murder,” by Chandler, an essay that is easy to find. Carr’s riposte “With Colt and Luger” is a little harder to come about. It was originally published by The New York Times in September 1950).

The world of shady dames and guns in trench-coat pockets is no more “real” than the world of country houses and idiosyncratic amateurs; besides, if a drunken ex-cop, with a long rap sheet and a string of unhappy ex-wives can beat a fully equipped Police Department to the guilty party, why not a funny-looking Belgian refugee with a preposterous mustache? And, as far as literary sophistication goes, Ellery Queen, Carr and even Agatha Christie were doing some nice metalinguistic shenanigans back then when the wise guys were only wisecracking and trying to get away with it.

So, my appreciation for logic and the felt staleness of noir (and of much of its multitudinous progeny) drove me to the Golden Age. And I loved it! It was, as I said before, like a conversion experience. From Queen I went to Carr, I revisited Christie, I discovered Crispin and then found out today’s torchbearers—Shimada, Paul Halter, and others. I even became fond of Solar Pons.

Perhaps someday the conventions of the Golden Age will tire me as much as the conventions of noir did. But I don’t see it coming any time soon. I know that there are great, mediocre, and awful pieces in both schools, but it amazed me to realize how the great work that exists in the Golden Age tradition is underestimated, and how easy it is for mediocre stuff to get a free pass just because it happens to contain a dash of disillusion and a pinch of cynicism. And a shady dame wearing a trench coat.

Nevertheless, the idea that “proper” mystery literature is noir literature still goes strong in Brazil. You can see it in the reviews printed in newspapers and magazines, you can see it in the catalogues of the prestige publishers. And you can see it in the way the writers think, too. We are going to have a big national crime/mystery convention down here this April, in the city of Porto Alegre, and it will be called (guess what?) Porto Alegre Noir.

Posted in Books, Characters, Classic Mystery, Fiction, Genre, Guest, History, International, Noir, Pop Culture, Publishing, Readers, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“Tense Boundaries” (by Matthew Wilson)

Posted on January 31, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen
By most definitions Matthew Wilson’s story “Burg’s Hobby Case,” in the Department of First Stories of our current issue, would not quite qualify as historical fiction. Many people consider fifty years in the past the necessary distance to earn the tag “historical,” and the story’s setting is a few years short of that. Moreover, the events belong to a time period within the author’s lifetime, and some determine what belongs to the historical genre according to that measure. Reimagining something so far in one’s past is still a feat, though, and Matthew Wilson does it marvelously well, evoking tensions surrounding the Cold War. We are pleased to welcome this talented new writer to our pages, and think you’ll find interesting this post relating to the genesis of the story.—Janet Hutchings

When people ask someone like me “Where are you from?” it is a hard question to answer. Where I am from, meaning where I was born? That would be California, but there were stops in Kentucky, Kansas, Texas, and Washington. And if you were a kid like me, it seemed as if every town in America began with the word Fort. There was Fort Ord, Fort Hood, Fort Knox, and Fort Lewis. But there were also those six years in Germany. You see, kids like me had fathers (and a few mothers) who were soldiers, so that meant rotations to new duty stations every few years, and as part of the Cold War we accompanied them to all those garrison towns lined up along the fault line that split Europe in two for forty years. I know a few adults now who had this same kind of childhood, and we remember places like Illesheim, Schweinfurt, Bamberg, Augsburg, Kaiserslautern (K-town), Wertheim, Wildflecken (try to say that with a good German accent!), and my favorite, Bad Kissingen, which we often called BK for short. For many of us, these places hold strange and magical memories, and even today we feel ourselves lucky to have lived there. Just do a Facebook search of any of these garrison towns, and you will find groups of nostalgic cyber-friends sharing photos and memories of their Cold War childhoods.

So when I made up my mind to write some stories, I knew that I wanted to set them in this world. Ever since reading Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park I have loved mystery stories in which the place is as essential to the mystery as a murder or other crime. By place I mean both a place in geography and a place in time, so that is why Bad Kissingen intrigues me so much.

I lived there from 1976 to 1979. My father was serving with the 2nd Squadron of the 11th Armored Cavalry, commonly known as Eaglehorse. We lived on the second smallest U.S. instillation in Germany, Daley Barracks. Daley Barracks was like an American small town smack in the heart of central Europe. We ate burgers and BLTs at the AAFES snack bar, played pick-up basketball in the post gym, and lined up around the block for months-old blockbusters like Smokey and the Bandit or Saturday Night Fever at the post theater. There was Wednesday night league play at the six-lane bowling alley and bingo on Sundays at the NCO club. We shopped at the commissary for processed American comfort food like Pop Tarts and Mac & Cheese, and for music we had the Armed Forces Network. Depending on what time of day, AFN would offer country music one hour, maybe top 40 the next, only to switch later on to R&B and soul.

We were often reminded that we were only thirteen kilometers from the East German border. Just on the other side of that border were divisions of Soviet armor ready to roll over us on their way to capture bigger prizes in places like Frankfurt and Stuttgart. If a real war broke out, we were doomed. Of course, this was a kind of war that no one could really win. With tactical nuclear weapons deployed on both sides of the border, no sane person really wanted to see a shooting war. So Eaglehorse had another job, and that was the border mission, a kind of a maintenance of the stalemate that was Europe at the time. Our fathers and the young soldiers under them spent many cold nights in observation posts and on patrols by foot and vehicle along that border. It seemed that what they mostly did was watch their communist counterparts watch them. I remember more than once waking at five in the morning to the rumble of tracked armored vehicles on the way to that border.

Many of our fathers were Vietnam veterans, soldiers of a lost war and now part of a new military, one without the conscription that had once sent men like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash to Germany. The army in the late seventies was searching for its post-Vietnam identity, and the young men serving under our fathers were the first of a new all-volunteer force. There was trouble. I suppose that’s only natural with something new. If you research that era you might find stories of poor leadership, drug problems, racial tension, and a general malaise. But what I mostly remember were young soldiers not much older than me and my teenage brothers, and how despite their deadly weapons occupation, they were just teenagers too. They wanted to drink beer and flirt with girls and stay out of trouble with their sergeants, who happened to be our fathers.

The best place for them to drink beer and flirt with girls was in town, in Bad Kissingen. Now here was a place that was nothing like the machines and guns and hard regulation of the garrison, nothing like the cold and tense border. Bad Kissingen was filled with spa tourists and the locals who served them. There were gardens and parks where well-dressed men and women seemed to stroll in perfect step like something out of a Seurat painting, only with fashions updated to the 1970s and with a German orderliness. String quartets played from ornate band shells, fountains flowed with salty and medicinal waters, and arched colonnades ascended over beds of roses. There were gasthäuser where young soldiers could find a meal and a drink, or discotheques where they hoped for a chance with a girl. For kids like me, the shops held the most interest, especially the hobby shop full of scale models of the machines of the war that brought Americans to live in Bad Kissingen in the first place. We loved anything from that era—plastic Tiger Panzers, Messerschmitts, Shermans, P-51 Mustangs.

The older German men we usually encountered from that era were of two kinds. Those who had taken up low wage work on Daley Barracks, and the shopkeepers who watched us warily since we had a reputation for thievery. These men began to intrigue me, and some of them stand out in my memory. There was a one-armed man who ran the register at an Edeka shop, and I wondered at his lost arm—was it a war wound? I worked one summer with an old bald-headed fellow who was like a comic-book strongman. We moved furniture in and out of the American housing area as families came and went, and he could carry an entire chest of drawers on his back up three twisting stairwells. He spoke no English, so from him I learned langsam, vorsicht, and fertig—slow, careful, finished. He was a lifelong worker bee who, when he wasn’t lifting heavy things, seemed to smoke one cigarette after another. There was a drunken barber who cut hair on Daley Barracks. His English was almost as limited, which was a good thing for him, since he had to endure plenty of cursing after yet another botched cut. Best to get your haircut early in the day before the schnapps took full effect. My detective Hans Burg comes from this same generation, men who had to live on after a lost and horrible war, much as our own fathers also seemed to be doing, although our fathers continued to soldier on at the border and in the big training areas like Grafenwöhr and Hohenfels.

Bad Kissingen was also a place where I really grew aware of the two distinct sides of my own origin. My father’s army and the community that existed with it—a place of commissaries, PXs, NCO clubs, Star and Stripes newspapers, cars stopped in traffic at 5 pm for taps—places like Daley Barracks. And my mother’s world too. Like a lot of my friends, I had a German mother who married a GI. Some of my friends had names like Heike and Stefan—I felt lucky to escape that fate. Our mothers might have cooked up schweinebraten one night and southern-style pork chops the next. We were as familiar with leberkäse as we were with a can of Spam. And we had grandparents too, opas and omas, who were delighted when our fathers rotated back to Germany from one of those forts stateside. My own grandfather is the deaf man mentioned on a document Hans Burg encounters in his investigation.

Ultimately, Bad Kissingen in that time was for me a strange contradiction. A pretty village dedicated to curing bodies and spirits, situated on the very edge of a barbed and mined frontier, where mutual destruction was assured. Where other tense boundaries existed: between tanks and gardens, German hosts and American guests, sergeants and privates, blacks and whites, men and women, young and old, realists and idealists. I hope you enjoy Bad Kissingen as a lively backdrop for a mystery story.

Posted in Books, Guest, Historicals, International, Readers, Setting, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

“3 Reasons a Good Mystery Is as Good as High-Lit” by Lawrence Light

Posted on January 24, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen
The author of a series of crime novels featuring financial reporter Karen Glick, Larry Light is himself a writer and editor for CBS MoneyWatch. His award-winning journalism career includes work for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, and other publications, but for this post, he chose not to talk about the world of finance. A voracious reader of both literary fiction and crime fiction, he offers his view of why crime fiction deserves to be held in critical esteem. EQMM’s founding editor, Frederic Dannay, said that one of his goals for EQMM was “to raise the sights of mystery writers generally to a genuine literary form.” He would have agreed, we think, with Larry’s perspective on the two fields. In case you missed it, Larry Light has a story (“Dysperception”) in the current issue of EQMM.—Janet Hutchings

“It transcends the genre.”

How many times have you come across that backhanded compliment in a review of a mystery novel? The underlying assumption of this loaded phrase is that mysteries are cheap amusements, empty calories that a truly discerning reader should disdain.

But really, there’s no demarcation line between the very best mysteries and literary fiction, and that’s been true for years. Graham Greene, the Nobel-winning author of venerated titles such as The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, also produced novels he called “entertainments.” These were spy and crime stories that some judged to be of lesser caliber than his other offerings. Indeed, the entertainments also had an enormous amount of literary merit—well-written works offering deep characterization and acute observations on humanity.

Take his Brighton Rock, a 1938 thriller that revolves around a gangster named Pinkie Brown, who has murdered a reporter wise to the local rackets. On the surface, the book is a typical quest to find the killer. But the story is really about the nature of evil and morality. Augmenting the tale is the conflicted nature of Pinkie, a homicidal sociopath whose Catholicism nevertheless torments him because he knows his heinous activities damn him.

I find that mysteries often are more fun to read than current high-lit because they tend to be better plotted and more tightly written. Three examples. I loved All the Light We Cannot See, which depicts World War II’s horrors and shows how common decency is found between two strangers on opposite sides. Could Anthony Doerr’s book have benefited from a trimming? Probably. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? Masterful, but exhausting at over 1,000 pages. Don DeLillo’s Libra? The alternative telling of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life, had a meandering pace that did it no favors, although it told an interesting story.

Celebrated mystery writer Laura Lippman likes to point out that “high-lit is a genre, too.” As Greene’s work attests, the difference blurs between top-notch mysteries and literary novels. Raymond Chandler, Dennis Lehane, P.D. James, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block—you can match these authors and many like them with high-lit’s worthies.

Sure, not all mystery novels even attempt to scale the literary heights. But the best mysteries are on a par with high-lit because they: 1) provide a crucial insight into human existence where things are often not what they seem, 2) illuminate important social issues, and 3) are captivatingly well-paced and well-written.

One of the best-known exemplars of crime fiction has a secure berth in the literary pantheon: The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic delivers on the three reasons that make a good mystery shine above all else.

He gradually unveils how his main character, the corrupt, nouveau riche Gatsby, is actually driven by love; shines a light on the ways the arrogant wealthy “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money”; and nourishes the soul with fine flourishes of writing. To wit: “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

When looking at the very best mysteries, you’ll find that what elevates them to the exalted levels of high-lit is some or all of these factors:

Offering a Key Insight Into Existence. Frequently, what the eye sees is deceiving. Finding out what we don’t know is at the core of much great literature, as in the line from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Who committed the crime and why are the primary elements of any mystery, whether the villain is Hamlet’s uncle or Pinkie Brown. So is how the perp can be stopped. Once we at last find the truth, it’s immensely satisfying.

Getting to this resolution is a tantalizing puzzle. Take The Silence of the Lambs. FBI Agent Clarice Starling is flummoxed about how to find the serial killer, Buffalo Bill. Then the imprisoned Hannibal Lecter, who has a soft spot for her, tells the agent that the man’s impetus to kill and skin his plus-sized female victims is that he “covets” something. And he adds: “We begin by coveting what we see every day.” So Clarice eventually figures out that she must focus on Bill’s first victim, as he likely knew her.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the iconic spy novel, is a wonderful mystery that turns on the quest to unmask the Soviet mole at the heart of the British Secret Service. Author John le Carré’s hero, George Smiley, is in charge of the investigation but initially is blind to the culprit’s identity due to animosity concerning his unfaithful wife.

A similar affliction besets Rusty Sabich, in Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. Rusty is an adulterous prosecutor who is charged with the murder of his lover. One of the last people he suspects of being the true murderer is hinted at early, in a catalogue of that killer’s strange interests—one of them is artificial insemination.

Tackling Societal Issues. As the French author Jean-Patrick Manchette put it: “The crime novel is the great moral literature of our time.”

The connection between crime fiction and burning issues that beset the world is strong. For a powerful portrayal of the drug trade and its corrupting power on our nation’s urban life, read Don Winslow’s The Force. Its antihero, Detective Denny Malone, justifies taking bribes as society paying its dues to ensure he does its dirty work.

In Alafair Burke’s The Wife, sexual harassment is examined in a way that demonstrates how the he-said-she-said version of reality has more nuances than some may imagine. And Greg Isles’ Natchez Burning trilogy delves into old crimes and race relations in the Deep South with harrowing, deeply affecting brio.

Fine Writing. Among the all-time hits are Raymond Chandler’s description of the Santa Ana wind, in his short story, “Red Wind”: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.”

James Lee Burke’s lyrical touch is always at the ready, as seen in his latest novel, Robicheaux, where his recovering alcoholic hero smells booze as it is poured into a glass over ice: “My defenses were down, the smoky smell of the Scotch like an irresistible thread from an erotic dream you can’t let go of at first light.”

Alice’s Sebold’s The Lovely Bones starts in a way that stills your heart: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”

Crime fiction. With authors like these, you’re keeping superb company, easily the equal of anything on the bookshelf.

Posted in Books, Characters, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Readers, Story, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

“Thoughts Lurking in an English Sitting Room” (by Jane Jakeman)

Posted on January 17, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Jane Jakeman is the author of a series of crime novels featuring the Regency detective Ambrose Malfine, and also two books starring modern French investigator Cecile Galant.  She is an art historian and sometimes writes short stories that draw on her experiences in that field. She has contributed three stories to EQMM, the latest of which, “Tapping the Glass,” set in Oxford, is in our current issue (January/February 2018). For two decades Jane did interviews and reviewed crime fiction for a British national daily. In today’s post she talks about some of the stars of the genre whom she interviewed. (All of those she mentions here have, at one time or other, been contributors to EQMM!)—Janet Hutchings

In the middle of the comfortably furnished room, I stood still in shock. Amid the armchairs, cushions, and coffee tables of a pleasant middle-class household in central London was a white marble bust of a young woman, skilfully carved to give the effect of a veil covering the perfectly formed face beneath. Her eyes were open, but was she alive or dead?

I peered more closely. “Ah, yes,” said my hostess, a smile on her pleasant face. “That’s the Veiled Bride. Lovely, isn’t she?”

Personally, I’d have been terrified to have that bride anywhere near me, but my hostess and interviewee was the crime writer P.D. James, and I had been wondering where, in this friendly family home, might be some trace of the preoccupation a crime novelist must surely have with death. As a crime writer myself, I have reviewed and interviewed crime authors over a couple of decades for the British print daily, The Independent, now, sadly in my view, only available online, and I was delighted when Phyllis James invited me to her home. She explained that her Veiled Bride was a copy of a sculpture belonging to the Duke of Devonshire and had been created by an Italian sculptor, Raffaele Monti, in 1847. At that time, it was appealing to the Victorian Gothic taste, but I was surprised to see it in cheerful modern surroundings. However, it not only gave me an insight into the depths of feeling behind her fiction, but also justified my belief that interviews should be conducted face-to-face. Many young journalists believe they can conduct the interview by electronic media, but even Skype cannot give the sense of actually being in the room with someone, let alone their odd tastes for the macabre.

For myself, I’ve been a lover of crime fiction since I was a teenager, reading it late at night while my mother kept telling me “Go to sleep!” The most attractive aspect of the genre is, for me, a story that twists and turns and has a solution. But, underlying this, I think the best crime fiction poses the unspoken question, “Does this author have a preoccupation with death?” After all, these stories almost always revolve round a murder or murders. The Scottish writer Val McDermid commented on this in another interview, “With death, the stakes are higher, the ante has been upped. I’m not sure I can get away from that kind of adrenalin rush. Death means people really have something to care about, something to fight for.”

Val McDermid was describing an effect of murder which I had realised when I invented my Regency detective, Lord Ambrose Malfine. In the first novel featuring him, Let There Be Blood, he has retreated from society, physically and mentally scarred from warfare. Only one thing is powerful enough to force him out of his retreat: a murder he must solve. That alone can bring him into contact with the rest of society.

Another writer whose life contained a surprise was Minette Walters, who will be well-known to crime fans for, among many other successful novels, The Sculptress, about a woman imprisoned for murder. Minette is a delicately pretty lady, one would think totally unfamiliar with the inside of a prison. But, no, she told me that she had been a regular visitor to Winchester gaol. This prison, in the gracious city where Jane Austen is buried, is actually one of the toughest in Britain, where hardened murderers and rapists are confined. But Minette had long one-to-one talks with some of these men. As the only “civilian” with whom they might come into contact, they confided in her intimate details of their lives which she felt honourably bound not to use in any of her books. But, clearly, this primary contact with murderers gave her a perspective not only on victims, but on killers, for she said rather chillingly that the men in Winchester seemed perfectly ordinary on the face of it, men whom one might meet in any situation.

Belinda Bauer, whose phenomenally successful Blacklands describes a murderer seen through the eyes of a small boy, made much the same point. “Statistically all of us know a paedophile,” she told me, “all of us know a rapist. We try not to think about it.”

Quite. It’s a very uncomfortable thought, but it is in some ways the job of the crime writer to think uncomfortable thoughts. And to read uncomfortable material. I spent some distressing hours reading reports of actual murders, and I can tell you there is nothing we writers could invent that is as horrible as what happens in real life. The difference is that between the covers of a detective story, the horrors can be controlled and contained. Yes, it’s our job to provide reassurance as well.

In my story, “Tapping the Glass,” I set out to reassure myself. I’ve always been terrified of insects and when I heard the true account of a house in Oxford where there is an inexplicable recurrent infestation of bluebottles, I virtuously decided to go to the University Museum to try and learn something about flies and thereby cure my terror. There were various insects pinned to display cards and as I walked along the gallery I saw a glass case labelled, “Salmon Pink Tarantula.” I plucked up the courage to go closer and saw a large spider with rather attractive furry pink and black legs in a nest of leaves. Congratulating myself on my courage, I went closer and read the small print, which said, “Please do not tap on the glass.”

Indeed, it was alive! Regularly fed and the pride of the entomology department. It seemed to me that this is what we do with history, not just with biology: We think it is safely dead and behind glass, so as to speak, but sometimes it can come alive and jump out at us. This was the germ of my story.

I can honestly say I have never used any of my interviewees’ stories in my own fiction because I take great pleasure in creating problems and resolutions in narratives and creating my own atmospheres and characters. And I’m very proud of appearing in the pages of EQMM alongside so many fine practitioners of murder stories!

Posted in Fiction, Genre, Gothic, Guest, History, International, Readers, Story, Writers, Writing | Leave a comment

A New True-Crime Department for EQMM and Some Reflections on Converging Fields

Posted on January 10, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Yesterday, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s new web-only column Stranger Than Fiction went live on our website. Written by award-winning Canadian author and journalist Dean Jobb, the new department explores the true-crime field through reviews of true-crime books and occasional articles about real-world crimes and criminals. It’s available—for free—on our website.

Columnist Dean Jobb is a true-crime specialist with more than a half-dozen titles in print, including one of 2015’s most notable true-crime works, Empire of Deception. The story of a master swindler in 1920s Chicago, the book won both the Crime Writers of Canada and Chicago Writers Association awards, and earned rave reviews. The New York Times Book Review called it “intoxicating and impressively researched.” In addition to pursuing literary and journalistic careers, Dean Jobb teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Stranger Than Fiction debuted with Dean’s roundup of choices for the best true-crime books of 2017, and that column will remain current until the beginning of February, after which it, like all future columns, will be archived on the site and remain accessible to readers. Going forward, each issue of EQMM will contain a preview of what’s coming up in Stranger Than Fiction, with the full text available only on our website. Readers of digital editions of the magazine will be able to click straight through from the previews to the full columns.

Here’s your peek at what’s coming up: February’s Stranger Than Fiction, entitled “I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere,” explores, through reviews of new critical works, the creation and enduring popularity—130 years after he first appeared in print—of Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective. A tie-in to EQMM’s annual Holmes tribute (celebrated in our January/February issue), the installment complements the special Holmes reviews provided in the magazine by Jury Box columnist Steve Steinbock.

In March, Dean takes a look at the latest books on the history of Chicago crime: a gambling king, a century-old miscarriage of justice, Al Capone’s rivals, and the murderous rampage of the White City “Devil.”

We are all so excited about this new department that I have to remind myself why EQMM waited so long to cover a segment of crime literature that has been recognized by the Mystery Writers of America through the Edgar Allan Poe Award category Best Fact Crime since 1948. The truth is that up until the early 1990s, it was almost an axiom in publishing that the readership for crime fiction had little overlap with the readership for true crime. That was, of course, before Patricia Cornwell came on the scene in a big way with the debut of her medical-examiner detective Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a series informed by the six years Cornwell spent working in the office of the chief medical examiner of Virginia. The series inspired TV shows like CSI in the fiction realm, and true-crime shows such as Cold Case, and it’s been argued that CSI’s lasting legacy is that jurors in real criminal cases have, ever since, expected conclusive forensic evidence. Conversely, fact appears to be influencing fiction in more profound ways nowadays, as writers draw upon real investigative techniques, police procedures, and even notorious crime cases in ever more detail to aid in the fashioning of their stories. There ought, therefore, to be a natural crossover of interest between modern mystery/crime fiction and true crime.

I think one reason publishers were sceptical of such crossover in the past is that their paradigm for mystery fiction was the classical whodunit, in which the puzzle was supreme and gritty details of the sort found in real crime cases seldom featured. But I suspect that readers who prefer the classical cozy are no more immune than any other crime-fiction fan to the lure of a good real-life puzzle, and if we look back to the early days of mystery fiction, we can see that even some highly artificial mystery stories exerted an influence upon the detection of crime in the real world. It has long been noted that fingerprint and footprint evidence appeared in the Sherlock Holmes stories before being commonly used by real police forces, and recently I came across an interesting article in Smithsonian about the psychiatrist who pioneered criminal profiling, James A. Brussel. What struck me most strongly was this paragraph:

Brussel called his approach reverse psychology. Today we call it criminal profiling. Whatever the term, it was still a virtually untested concept in the 1950s. Brussel’s role models at the time were fictional investigators, most notably C. Auguste Dupin, the reclusive amateur detective invented by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s. Dupin was the original profiler, a master channeler of the psychotic mind and the forebear of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

How incredible to think that more than a hundred years after Poe constructed his complex fictional cases for Dupin, a real criminologist began to form a new science based on his sleuth’s methods. The truth seems to be that there has always been a two-way street between crime fiction and fact crime, and we’re very pleased (finally!) to present our readers with a column that represents the fact side of that street.

Have a look and let us know what you think!—Janet Hutchings

Posted in Ellery Queen, Magazine, Police Procedurals, Real Crime, Stranger Than Fiction | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Edwin Hill on Writing

Posted on January 3, 2018 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Edwin Hill makes his fiction debut in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s current issue (January/February 2018). The tale, entitled “White Tights and Mary Janes,” was inspired, in part, by a short stint he did at a for-profit college. Currently, he is vice president and editorial director for Bedford/St. Martin’s, a division of Macmillan. At the end of August 2018, Edwin’s first novel, Little Comfort, will be published by Kensington Books (with a second book already contracted). As he explains in this post, his story for EQMM began life as part of an earlier draft of that book. EQMM is trying something a little different today; we’re posting a podcast of “White Tights and Mary Janes,” Edwin’s debut story, this afternoon, to coordinate with this post and the print version of the story currently on sale.—Janet Hutchings

I’ve worked as an editor for most of my professional career, including my current stint as the vice president and editorial director at Bedford/St. Martin’s, which is a division of Macmillan Learning. I cherish the collaborative nature of writing and book making, especially the type of detailed development work that we do in academic publishing. And by now, I’m comfortable with both the editorial process and the recursive nature of writing. Still, I hadn’t had my own writing put to the test until an agent agreed to try to sell my first novel, Little Comfort, in the summer of 2014.

Below are five lessons learned during the three and a half years since that day.

  1. Rejection letters are the key to success.

The first time my agent submitted Little Comfort to publishers, it was rejected practically everywhere, and, I won’t lie to you, it was terrible. Most of the passes were polite and short, purposefully noncommittal. As an editor, I know how important it is not to give authors false hope. If a manuscript isn’t for you, it’s important to say that so that the writer can move on to someone who can support the project.

However, there was a bright spot in this process. In academic publishing, we use peer reviews all the time to help shape a manuscript. Academics will write detailed, and often very polite, reviews, and a good editor is able to synthesize the views of many different academics so that the author can shape the material to better fit the audience.

I read the rejection letters in the same way that I would read reviews to see what trends I could pull from them. One trend I started to see was that many editors mentioned that there was too much story in the manuscript. One editor—in a single gold mine of a sentence—went as far to say that the manuscript read like two novels mashed together. And that gave me enough to work with as I began an extensive revision process.

  1. Don’t kill your darlings, part one—recycle them.

Little Comfort began as three intertwined stories: Hester Thursby, a librarian who uses her research skills to find missing people; Sam Blaine, a charming grifter who reinvents himself to gain the trust of the wealthy and powerful; and Maxine Pawlikowski, the embattled leader of a for-profit college under federal investigation for fraud. I quickly realized that one of the stories had to go, so I spent about six months excising poor Maxine from the story. What resulted was a stronger novel—more focused, with a commitment to a single protagonist who could support a series.

I also wound up with the short story, “White Tights and Mary Janes,” which focuses on Maxine. To read more, visit here.

  1. Don’t kill your darlings, part two—you may need them.

Like many first-time novelists, I read, and continue to read advice from other writers, including very good tips for cutting as much backstory as possible from a polished manuscript. Backstory really can slow down the forward momentum of the novel and, worst of all, it can be boring.

As an editor, I know that many writers need to warm up to get into a manuscript, especially a first draft. I use backstory to get to the meat of the story, so trimming it away from the finished product is almost always a good idea. As I prepped Little Comfort for submission #2, I combed the manuscript for backstory and cut nearly all of it.

After I sold the novel to Kensington, and my editor sent his development notes, it turned out that most of his questions were about what had happened to get my main characters where they were, i.e. backstory. Thankfully I’d kept every single draft of the manuscript and was able to piece together a solid—and brief—backstory for each of the characters that answered my editor’s queries.

  1. Time away from a manuscript is a good thing.

Copyediting happens late in the writing and editing process. Good copy editors do much more than correct grammar. They find problems in your manuscript around logic and continuity, as well as structure, word choice, and repetition. And yes, they correct your grammar. A great copy editor will help you put the finishing polish on your manuscript and make you a much better writer in the process.

When I got the copyedits on my manuscript, I was deep into writing a new novel and hadn’t looked at Little Comfort in months. The nice thing about seeing the copyedits was that it made me think about my writing in a different way, and helped me catch some bad habits. I always believed I was a pretty clean writer, but it’s never too late to learn! For more on my own copyediting process, click here.

  1. Be mindful of names

Avoid naming terrible, terrible characters after real people, especially ones with whom you may have a conflicted relationship! Also, don’t name rifles after friends who are anti-gun. And if you choose to name a character after someone’s dog, ask. Especially if that character is a serial killer.

But, that’s what Find and Replace is for, and that’s why the editorial process has many steps and can sometimes be maddeningly slow. We all want to get it right. That takes time, and a great team.

Posted in Characters, Guest, Publishing, Story, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM EQMM

Posted on December 27, 2017 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Happy New Year from EQMM, and best wishes for 2018. What are your reading resolutions for the year?

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

“Great God! This is an awful place.” (by Christine Poulson)

Posted on December 20, 2017 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Setting always features interestingly in Christine Poulson’s fiction, whether it is Cambridge and the surrounding Fens as depicted in her Cassandra James mystery series; Sweden, Hong Kong, and Devon in her novel Invisible; or the cathedral of her upcoming EQMM story “Faceless Killer” (March/April 2018). Her settings are almost always places she has visited, but in her novel Cold, Cold Heart, due to be released in the U.S. next month, she employs a setting that only research could provide access to: the Antarctic plateau. It’s evident from this post that research—and imagination!— has worked its magic for her in bringing the place to life.—Janet Hutchings

Martin Cruz Smith visited Moscow for only two weeks on a tourist visa before setting his best-seller, Gorky Park, there. Harry Keating went one better. He had never visited India when he began his series of Inspector Ghote novels set in Mumbai.

A few years ago I wrote a guest post for EQMM, “A Sense of Place,” in which I explained that I admired these writers and their chutzpah, but that I could never write about a place that I didn’t know. And now—having well and truly nailed my colours to the mast—I’ve gone and set the greater part of a novel somewhere that I’ve never visited, and never will.

Think of this: a place where each night lasts for months and so does each day. The mean annual temperature is −57 °C. It’s a place where money isn’t important because there’s nothing to buy. There are no children or old people or land mammals and only one species of insect. There are no trees or shrubs or flowers, no fresh fruit or vegetables or meat or milk or eggs.

These are only some of the things you’ll miss along with your family and friends when you fly in to spend the winter on a remote research base on the Antarctic plateau. This was the place I planned to send my series character, scientist Katie Flanagan.

There were however things that she’d have plenty of. Silence. Space. Ice. Time. There’d be a strange, bleak beauty to the landscape and on starry nights the breath-taking aurora australis, the Southern lights, would ripple across the sky. Another plus: she wouldn’t catch a cold or flu, because there’ll be no-one bringing in viruses from the outside world. But just as no-one would be coming in, nor would anyone be going out. Once the last plane left at the end of February the base would be completely cut-off until late October, because it would be cold enough to gelatinise engine oil. It is easier to get back from the International Space Station than from the Antarctic plateau in mid winter. Wintering over in Antarctica has much in common with long duration deep space missions, and serves as a valuable substitute for research into the physiological and psychological effects of extreme isolation and confinement.

Whatever happens on the base has to be dealt with on the base. The commander is sworn in as a magistrate before the winter begins. As for medical emergencies: There was a famous occasion in the early sixties when a Russian doctor on a Soviet base removed his own appendix under a local anesthetic while a driver and a meteorologist stood by, holding a mirror and handing him instruments.

On my fictional research base, only ten would winter over (a nod to Agatha Christie’s And Then There None). There would be a doctor, a couple of astronomers, a meteorologist, a chef (yes, they do have their own chef!), an electrical engineer, a plumbing and heating engineer, a mechanic, a computer and communications guy—and Katie as medical researcher.

And one of these would vanish from the base. . . .

Once I’d had this idea, how could I resist? There was no going back for me either. But a research trip was out of the question and not only because of the distance and the expense. No-one gets out to the most remote bases without having a very good reason and it is only a very select few who can spend the winter there.

Luckily those who have wintered over often feel compelled to record their experiences, and there is an abundance of memoirs and biographies going back to the early days of Antarctic exploration. Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic, The Worst Journey in the World (1922) tells the story of an expedition to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin, from which he and two others were lucky to return alive, and this is followed by an account of Scott’s ill-fated attempt to be first to reach the South Pole. It was Scott who wrote “Great God! This is an awful place” in the journal that was discovered with his frozen body and those of his companions.

Another stand-out account is Richard E. Byrd’s Alone (1958) which tells the story of his attempt in 1934 to spend the winter alone a hundred miles inland, and it is as gripping as any thriller. But of all the early polar explorers the one I came most to revere was Shackleton. He never lost a single man under his command. He was within a hundred miles of being the first to reach the South Pole and called a halt because there was not enough food to get his men back alive. “Better a living donkey than a dead lion,” he explained.

Coming up to the present day, Gavin Francis’s Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins (2012), and Alex Gough’s Solid Sea and Southern Skies: Two Years in Antarctica (2010) are fascinating contemporary accounts. I immersed myself in these and in everything I could get hold of. I followed blog posts from Antarctica and watched documentaries and films, including the highly entertaining South of Sanity, a horror film scripted by, shot by, and starring a team wintering over one year at Rothera, a British Antarctic Survey base.

Yet informative as all this was, it wasn’t enough. I needed to talk to someone who had actually wintered over in Antarctica. Ideally this would be a young woman and a medic—someone like my character, Katie. What were the odds that I would find such a person living fifteen minutes drive from me? But that is exactly what happened. I found Rose, now working at a local hospital, via the blog she had written while she was in Antarctica. Over a couple of long lunches I learned about all the little traditions and rituals that make up life on the ice, about the danger posed by fire or loss of power, about what it was like to be on night duty, the only person awake on the silent base, and much, much more. Later, she read a draft of my novel (Cold, Cold Heart, published in the U.K. in November and due to be released in the U.S. in January) and picked up the things I hadn’t got quite right. It was a privilege and a pleasure to meet her.

Cherry-Garrard commented that “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.” That has changed. These days there are few deaths in Antarctica. The bases are well-stocked and (relatively) comfortable, especially the newer ones. But still this remains one of the most hostile environments on the planet, where no aspect of survival can be taken for granted. It is also one of the most fascinating and awe-inspiring and I have loved visiting it, if only in my imagination.

Posted in Adventure, Books, Characters, Setting, Writers, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments