“Is It Time for an Intervention? My Life With Mysteries” (by Joni Langevoort)

Posted on November 27, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Joni Langevoort describes herself as a lifelong fan of books in general and of the mystery genre in particular. Her knowledge of the field is impressive, and she has come to be greatly appreciated by editors and others in the business through her role as publisher liaison on the board of directors of Malice Domestic, the annual conference celebrating the traditional mystery. She’s the first person on this site to talk about the interconnectedness of the various mystery conventions and the links between branches of the mystery community. My guess is that her experiences may inspire others to take a more active role in fandom.—Janet Hutchings

Take a look at some of the titles on my Kindle—The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion; The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust; Wall Street and the Financial Crisis; 1861: The Civil War Awakening; The Political Brain.

You might think, whoa, she’s deep. And smart. Maybe a little too serious. Trouble is, my law professor husband and I share the Kindle library, and these are his titles.

Here are some of mine: Diamonds for the Dead; The Curse of the Holy Pail; Deadly Descent; The Retribution; The Poisonous Seed; Wanted Man; The Fall of the House of Usher; Death Troupe; Seven Kinds of Hell. Authors? Well, there’s Louise Penny, Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Deborah Crombie, Charlaine Harris, Edgar Allan Poe, P.D. James, Elizabeth Peters, Harlan Coben, Sue Grafton . . .

Well, I’m smart too, and sometimes deep and serious. But here’s my confession: I am addicted to mystery and crime fiction. (Although some of these titles might also indicate: “She’s a serial killer.”)

Being a mystery and crime novel fan is not a bad addiction to have, as addictions go. It’s a bit expensive, and may lead to an occasional nightmare, but that’s about it. I blame my dad; once I passed through the Nancy Drew stage, he said, “Why don’t you try this Agatha Christie?” (It was Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.) Then it was on to Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Rex Stout, Georges Simenon, Josephine Tey, and S.S. Van Dine. By that time, it was way beyond my poor ability to turn back.

I’m not a writer—the last piece of fiction I wrote was a short story in 8th grade, called “The Man With the Black Bag.” It was about the Boston Strangler, and it earned an A-. But I do have something in common with every single mystery author I’ve met (and I’ve met a lot by now): I’m a fan. I’m a reader.

I stumbled onto my first convention in 2001, when Bouchercon was in my hometown of Washington D.C. I went primarily to meet my e-mail pal and fellow Mississippi native, Bill Fitzhugh. Bill and I had never met, but we knew all the same people in Mississippi (it’s a small state . . .). Not only did I meet Bill (who is still a treasured friend), but I met all these amazing writers whose books I had read for years, like Val McDermid and Lee Child. I also met new authors who became instant friends and favorites, like Sarah Strohmeyer.

I noticed a table there with information about a local convention that celebrated the genre typified by the works of all those authors my dad had introduced me to so long ago. I attended the next Malice Domestic, in May of 2001, and I knew immediately that these were “my people.” Although there were lots of people there who read only traditional mysteries, or only “cozies,” I discovered that these convention goers often read across the mystery genre — there were fans of historical mysteries, paranormal stories, true crime, horrifying serial- killer books, nonfiction reference books, private eyes and cops, and every imaginable kind of mystery. I volunteered for a couple of years, and somehow found myself shanghaied onto—er, talked into being on the board of directors. I’ve been to twelve Malices now, and it really is like a homecoming to meet up with all the great fans and authors, about 600 of them most years.

I kept going to the big brother of mystery conventions, Bouchercon, where I would see some of my Malice friends (I remember coming up to Louise Penny one year, and her surprise and joy that I actually knew who she was and had read every book she had written), but also those nontraditional writers I so loved. They were gracious, every one of them—Lee Child let me go all fan girl on him, and Daniel Woodrell didn’t flinch at all when I told him I thought he was a genius. Val McDermid still laughs every time I invite her to Malice (“I don’t think they’d like what I do with knitters and cats”), even though I assure her she would find hundreds of people there who love her works.

I’ve attended and loved Left Coast Crime, once purely to harass Bill Fitzhugh when he was toastmaster. LCC is similar in size to Malice, but while Malice is strictly a fan convention (remember, all those authors are also fans), LCC attracts lots of people to their author-programming track. I’ve even made my way across the pond a couple of times to attend Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. There’s a very different vibe there: All of the authors on panels are invited by the festival, and each separate event and panel is ticketed. This means there can be thousands of people there over the course of the festival weekend, even though the events themselves are similar in size to Bouchercon or Malice. Getting to know the British crowd, like Martin Edwards and Ann Cleeves, has been a delight.

I’ve met all the wonderful authors who are on my Kindle and my bookshelves, and some of them are my pals now. I’ve also made great friends in the mystery community at large. People like Ali Karim of Shots Magazine, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the world of crime fiction led our team to a close second-place finish at the Harrogate pub quiz one year, and Janet Rudolph, Kate Stine and Brian Skupin, and Margery Flax, who know everyone in the entire mystery world (I love to hang around with them!). As the publisher liaison on the Malice board, I have met and worked closely with fabulous publicists and editors from the great mystery publishing houses, like HarperCollins/Morrow, Poisoned Pen, Berkley Prime Crime, Dell Magazines, and Minotaur, and from the newer companies like Midnight Ink, Thomas & Mercer, and Henery Press. And I love the book dealers’ room!

I come away from every convention with more books than I need, but that hasn’t stopped me from eagerly snapping them up and getting them signed by the authors. If I buy no more books ever, I will be finished with my TBR pile around the turn of the next century. And then I can buy more mysteries! Or maybe I can buy another one tomorrow . . .

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BLACK FRIDAY DIGITAL EDITION SALE

Posted on November 25, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

EQM_Magzter_BlackFriday_adOur newest digital subscription sale through Magzter offers 60% off subscriptions from now through November 29th. Don’t miss it!

 

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“Today’s Literary Mystery—It’s Not What Your Granny Used to Read” (by Scott Loring Sanders)

Posted on November 20, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Scott Loring Sanders teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech. He’s also a novelist and an award-winning short-story writer. His topic for this post—pigeonholing by publishers and booksellers—is something he knows about from personal experience. His first novel, The Hanging Woods, is a dark and disturbing mystery that he intended for an adult audience, but because its central character is fourteen, it was packaged for young-adult readers. His second book, Gray Baby, was released in the same category. His publisher’s projection must have been that more sales would be gained by targeting a limited age group than by releasing the novels for the general adult market. The trouble with this strategy is that often it’s only those in the targeted group who ever hear about the work. In the case of Scott’s books, many adult readers missed mysteries they’d have enjoyed (though those who are interested can still purchase the books).—Janet Hutchings

In today’s market, there’s so much pigeonholing going on by publishers that a lot of good books and stories are being missed by readers. A work is labeled “Sci-Fi” and some will immediately run the other way. “Young Adult” and people think of a story only for teens. The same goes for “Mystery.” That word automatically turns off certain groups. I’m thinking mainly of scholars and academics who might feel that to read a mystery is to indulge in the superficial. An endeavor that will only fill their heads with fluff and poor, cliched writing. I’m here to tell you they are missing out. The current modern mystery is not only entertaining and suspenseful, it is often solid and legitimate literature.

Look at Dennis Lehane’s story “Until Gwen,” which was first published in The Atlantic and later anthologized in Otto Penzler’s Best American Mystery Stories (BAMS). The opening paragraph reads like this:

Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. Two minutes into the ride, the prison still hanging tilted in the rearview, Mandy tells you that she only hooks part-time. The rest of the time she does light secretarial for an independent video chain and tends bar, two Sundays a month, at the local VFW. But she feels her calling—her true calling in life—is to write.

Bam! The hooks are set and I’m ready to go on the ride. The story has a nasty yet wonderful villain in the father. He’s murderous, he’s callous, yet he’s also funny and maybe even slightly endearing. The story never takes its foot off the reader’s neck; it’s packed with tension, violence, and suspense. Yet there’s something far more complex happening than just the on-the-surface murder mystery. The characters are fully fleshed out. They are living, breathing (or not breathing in some cases), three-dimensional people who pop off the page. They are intriguing, they are deeply flawed, and by the end you can’t help but feel empathy, especially for the narrator; in fact, his ultimate fate is heartbreaking. Lehane uses the second person “you” to write this story, which is unconventional and often seen as gimmicky. But he uses it for a specific purpose (to reinforce the narrator’s lack of identity/lack of self) and not just as some artsy tactic or device. The story is told in a nonlinear fashion; it jumps all over the place and challenges the reader to keep up and pay attention. There is no doubt Lehane thought deeply about how to approach this story before he ever started writing it. So yes, it’s a mystery, but it’s also an excellent literary achievement, hence why it was first published in The Atlantic, which, last time I checked, isn’t exactly famous for its “mystery” stories.

But that’s what today’s authors in the field are doing. Pushing the boundaries. Blending the traditional qualities of a classic mystery with the art and craft of highbrow literature. Who says we can’t have both, all in one nice package? As a reader, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. I want edgy, I want hard-hitting, I want dark. I want to squeeze the pages in anticipation as I read, I want to be entertained, I want to be scared. Or worried. Or nervous. But I also want to care and be invested in multilayered characters. I want to think and be challenged. I want to admire an author’s turn of phrase or how he/she incorporates the perfect metaphor. I want to see their skill with the craft. In a nutshell, I want it all.

Apparently the experts see it the same way. If you take a look at Best American Mystery Stories 2012, for example, not surprisingly you’ll find that three of the stories selected were first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Yet The New Yorker had two of its stories selected. And I ask you, what is more highbrow than The New Yorker? Year in and year out, the BAMS series has quite an eclectic list of journals and magazines that they pull from. The reason? They don’t care what “category” a magazine generally publishes in; they are simply looking for quality. They are looking for the best stories of the year that deal with a mystery in some form or fashion.

And what types of authors are showing up in the anthology? Surely Stephen King and Lee Child, right? Nope. Instead, they are featuring authors like Alice Munro. She frequently appears in BAMS, and oh by the way, she just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The freaking Nobel Prize. A Nobel Laureate writing mystery stories, you say? Unheard of? Preposterous? Not at all. How about Joyce Carol Oates? I don’t know many scholars who look down their noses at her, yet a large majority of her stories are mystery in nature. She publishes in Ellery Queen, The New Yorker, and everywhere in between. There are so many good authors out there today who are writing in this subgenre that I’m calling Literary Mystery. Some include Tom Franklin, Holly Goddard Jones, Donald Ray Pollock, Scott Wolven, and Daniel Woodrell. These are writers at the top of their game, mixing literature with suspense and mystery. Another is Ron Rash. I had the privilege of being on a panel with him a couple of years ago, where the main focus was discussing Appalachian literature, his bread and butter. But one question I asked him went something like this: “Many of your stories and novels, though always Appalachian in nature, have a mystery element to them. And I don’t mean an Agatha Christie type mystery, but instead that sense of darkness, of suspense, of intrigue. Could you comment on that?” His response was nearly identical to something I tell my students all the time. He said, and I’m liberally paraphrasing here, but this is the gist: “You can write down all the pretty words in the world. You can make it flowery, and describe setting, and create characters, but if you can’t tell a story then none of it matters. You have to be able to tell a story. And that’s why a lot of what I write has a mystery feel, because at the heart of all mysteries is story.”

The above is not a new idea. Dashiell Hammett knew it, so did Raymond Chandler, yet they are never mentioned in the same breath as, let’s say, Faulkner or Steinbeck, who were both obviously revered as literary icons. But those two icons wrote plenty of stuff I’d consider mystery. Light in August? Of Mice and Men? Yep, those are literary mysteries. Or how about Flannery O’Connor? Take for example “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” arguably the most famous short story ever written. You won’t find many English professors who will scoff at O’Connor. But what exactly is that story if it isn’t a mystery? It’s suspenseful, filled with tension and conflict, there’s a crime, and it has a cast of characters who are complex and forever ingrained in our minds. The Misfit? The grandmother? Who can forget either of them? Is it a literary story with much deeper meaning? Absolutely. Are there questions of religion at play? Yes. Are there underlying themes about O’Connor’s own Catholic faith? Yes. But it’s also an excellent mystery and lends itself perfectly to my point. It’s exactly what many of today’s modern writers are doing: blending genres. Or, back before the days of pigeonholing, it was simply called good storytelling.

Mystery and literature don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Mystery is not a bad word. In fact, it’s a wonderful word. It means I can feel confident knowing that the author has put a lot of thought into the story while still paying attention to the craft. It means sharp writing and spot-on dialogue. It means imagery, setting, and plot. But what solid narrative, mystery or otherwise, doesn’t have those qualities? And perhaps that’s where the lines get blurred. Ultimately, what it comes down to is one simple thing: mystery means story. As acclaimed writer (and my grad school mentor from years ago) Pinckney Benedict used to say: “Just tell me a story.” And in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about? Isn’t that why we read?

Posted in Books, Business, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Publishing, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Just Send Me Back” (by Mary Jane Maffini)

Posted on November 13, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
There’s always at least a touch of humor in Mary Jane Maffini’s fiction—a spice that suits the traditional mystery. The Canadian author has won two major awards for stories in EQMM, and she’s also the author of three series of classical mysteries at novel-length, under her own name. More recently, she has teamed up with her daughter Victoria to write under the pseudonym Victoria Abbott. The second book in their series, which features book collecting, is out December 3rd. (See The Sayers Swindle.)
Before becoming a writer, Mary Jane was a librarian and co-owner of a mystery bookstore. She knows the classics of our genre, and she appreciates them in a way that only a writer can. . . .—Janet Hutchings

I’ve been buried in the past for the last couple of years. Usually I read a wide range of contemporary crime fiction, set in Canada, Europe, and the USA. But since embarking on the book-collector mystery series (co-written with my daughter), my reading and writing focus has been on the fascinating and collectible crime novels written by the greats of the past. This keeps me mostly in the twenties, thirties and forties, in the era known as The Golden Age of Detection. Of course, we can quibble with the time frame if we’re in a quibbling mood, but let’s just agree more or less around then. I must say that all this reading vintage mysteries for research is a highly recommended gig if you can get it.

Oh sure, in the so-called Golden Age of Detection there were social issues and life could be nasty, brutish, and short for those who weren’t in upper echelons of society. Even for them, appendicitis could be a death sentence, not to mention that the world was in the grip of depression for much of this era and there was the threat and the reality of a second world war that wiped out millions, regardless of social status. Get through one war and look, here’s another. But never mind that, for a contemporary writer, stuck in the quicksand of technology here as 2013 draws to an end, there’s still a lot of appeal.

I wonder if the greats of the Golden Age knew how much they had to be thankful for when it came to plotting and setting up their novels. Here are just a few of the advantages those writers had over those of us who are pounding keyboards in the Silicon Age. Not that I’m bitter, but have a look:

Back in the day, it was so easy to drop your characters into a remote location, or maroon them in a dark basement, or lock them in a high bell tower. There was no quick call to 911 or the significant other or even the hired help to come to the aid of the marooned detective. No cell phones whatsoever. Tell me, how convenient would that be? There would also be no need to have your hapless detective “forget” to charge the stupid thing or have it stolen by a passing villain. The author would never have to cause the device to “accidentally” fall into a puddle. There was no authorial requirement to invent “dead zones” when there’s a cell tower on every hill. The whole world was a dead zone. Bliss, if you ask me.

Even better, where there’s no cell phone, there’s no GPS in the nonexistent gadget to bring the police on the double to the exact location where the protagonist is in trouble. You have probably noticed that this often meant stuck in an isolated farmhouse in a snowstorm with a shrinking cast of characters and an unidentified and enthusiastic murderer on the prowl. You know what they say: What’s bad news for the character is good news for the author. You might still rig up the modern-day equivalent for a setting, but you’d have to work damn hard at it.

Related and added bonuses to the “no phones” era: no cell-phone cameras! Lovely. No urgent and silent texts and no video surveillance. Is it any wonder the crime rate is dropping in real life? Luckily, it’s not in fiction, and in vintage fiction, the writer can rely on witnesses, who are, by necessity, characters and therefore far better at conversation and more interesting than gadgets. For instance, the presence of footmen, upstairs maids, downstairs maids, cooks, laundresses, groomsmen, as well as the more upscale governesses, meant that in many a grand house, in addition to the luxury of servants, for the aristocratic occupants there was never an unobserved moment. The determined detective could weasel a lot out by cozying up to the servants or—and not so advisable—getting all heavy-handed and pulling rank. This leads to lots of good fun for the author and the reader and is not to be sneered at.

In many other ways, investigations were a bit easier on the author too. Think of it: There was no forensics (except for fingerprints the odd time). There’s nothing like DNA to complicate a case; DNA wasn’t even a twinkle in sharp old Poirot’s eye. There were no blood-splatter specialists, X-rays to ID gunshot residue, infrared spectrometry/spectroscopy or lasers for latent prints, or sophisticated tests for body fluids. This is all good. For one thing, there was a lot less of the messier aspects of murder (including decomp and the above mentioned body-fluid discussions). Far fewer terms to keep straight. The author could concentrate on observable clues, behavior of the suspects (all six of them), and pretty much steer clear of the lab and the pathologist’s lair. What’s not to love?

This brings me to databases: Well, where would you be without the well-known and well-organized international and national databases of fingerprints, firearms, stolen works of art, criminals, and unsolved cases and the ability to connect online, by e-mail, fax, and phone with other police forces? Left alone with your little grey cells, that’s where.

Not only were communications restricted to shouting into a black telephone receiver to the operator (if you could find a phone) but there was no squealing along in powerful vehicles, roof lights flashing, sirens wailing. Much of the time, there were no cars at all. The detective might purr through the countryside in his Bentley (watch the ruts in the road, Bunter!) but the local bobby will be wobbling along on his bike. I’ve just finished reading a book by Ngaio Marsh in which the very elegant Scotland Yard Inspector Alleyn and his Sergeant Fox have no way of getting to the location where a victim is in extreme danger except to run up a long and bumpy road—wearing, among other things, their heavy tweed overcoats. I’m betting there were hats too. Oh and, sorry to say, they were too late.

And speaking of hats. Hats almost need no explanation. The world is a much duller place without hats. Trust me. Ball caps can be used to obscure faces, but nothing replaces the zing that a new spring fedora gives the wearer and the reader. Just ask that well-known man about town and right hand of Nero Wolfe, the delectable Archie Goodwin. What would Archie wear to investigate on the streets of New York City today? Nothing as interesting, I am sure.

We contemporary types are missing out on other accessories too: particularly monocles, lorgnettes, pince-nez—something has been lost and soft daily contact lenses cannot in any way make up for it. Stick a monocle on a fellow and instantly you have a villain or a slightly foolish aristocrat. Think how Lord Peter Wimsey employed his monocle to underplay his own prodigious abilities.

Have I mentioned butlers? Trust me, today’s sleuth would be a lot further ahead if someone else laid out his or her wardrobe, handled the cleaning and maintenance of it, brushed your jacket before you left the house, all that kind of thing. All you would have to think about was the case at hand and not whether your shoes were shined or even a match. As the upper class like to say, it’s so hard to get good help these days. Tell me about it.

All in all, despite our political, personal, and technological choices, we writers have it tough today. So, I’m always happy with a trip to the past. Could you excuse me now, please? I believe that’s the upstairs maid bringing my breakfast in bed.

Posted in Adventure, Books, Characters, Editing, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Historicals, History, Police Procedurals, Setting, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

PULL UP A CHAIR

Posted on November 6, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Starting in mid-October this year, most big retailers where I live had their halls decked with Christmas trees right beside the Halloween goblins. The effect was bizarre, but it did get me thinking early about holiday plans, especially holiday dinners—anticipating the special foods, of course, but also looking forward to having time to enjoy conversation with family and friends.

At the same time, it got me thinking about dinners in fiction, one of the most famous of which occurs at Christmastime, in James Joyce’s “The Dead.” In the mystery genre, dinner-table discussion often centers around puzzle-solving rather than the sorts of philosophical questions that absorb the diners in Joyce’s story. Enough conventions have grown up around this type of mystery that I think it can almost be considered a distinct subgenre of the classical whodunit.

Some of the most memorable examples of this genre were written by Isaac Asimov. EQMM still gets letters from readers who remember, fondly, Asimov’s Black Widower stories, in which a group of six men, plus an invited guest, regularly meet for dinner and attempt to solve a murder at table.

I’ll admit right away that although I liked a number of the Black Widower stories, I am not, in general, a big fan of the dinner-table mystery. The problem, for me, is that in such stories the reader is removed a step from the action. We aren’t witnessing the unfolding of the murder or its aftermath or its investigation, we’re witnessing a report and discussion of it. I generally find that an impediment to forming a sympathetic understanding of the victim and other key characters. And the element of vicarious experience that I enjoy in fiction is compromised by the added distance at which we’re made to stand from such stories’ events.

But of course, the central aim of such a story may be to present a dazzling puzzle—a purely intellectual challenge—not to engage the reader emotionally. And if the puzzle is clever enough, the story will probably appeal even to readers like me, to whom a good puzzle is important but not all we’re looking for.

An author who manages to combine brilliant puzzles with characters readers have genuine empathy for is France’s Paul Halter. He manages to do so even at one remove, in the story-within-a-story framework of the dinner-table mystery. (His slight variation on the form is often set in a gentlemen’s club in London, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.)

I said earlier that certain conventions have grown up around this type of mystery. One of them is that there is a recurring cast of characters, and the mysteries they solve together are often brought to them by someone outside their circle. This allows an atmosphere of bonhomie to pervade the story—a sense of being among friends. The resulting repartee among the diners can be highly entertaining in the hands of a good writer of dialogue. Through it, in the best of these stories, the reader may come to form an attachment to the individuals at table, especially if they are not presented as a bunch of inhuman clever clogs. Generally speaking, though, the more time is devoted to developing the characters around the table, the more removed the reader is going to be from the tale of murder that’s being told. Unless the other diners interrupt whoever is laying out the circumstances of the murder frequently to ask questions and offer opinions, readers won’t get a good sense of who they are. But with each interruption, the reader is pulled out of the frame of the murder story and becomes less able to enter back into it with any sense of immediacy.

In the 1990s, former screenwriter Dennis Palumbo (whose credits include My Favorite Year and Welcome Back, Kotter) began a series of dinner-table mysteries starring The Smart Guys Marching Society, the first of them published in EQMM. It’s a coffee table topped with beer and popcorn rather than a sumptuous restaurant with gourmet specialties in the Palumbo stories, but the formula is the same. You’d expect the stars of this series to be ostentatiously brainy, irritating in their sense of superiority. Not so. Palumbo, who became a psychotherapist after retiring from film writing, has a good sense of his characters’ inner lives and is able to humanize them (one a neatnik, another a bit of a slob, all of them aware of how they’re ageing), with the result that the stories have more warmth than I usually associate with this genre. (You can find a collection of the stories, From Crime to Crime: Mind-Boggling Tales of Mystery and Murder, here.)

In the Palumbo stories, the important characters—the ones we engage with—are in the framing story. It seems to me that Paul Halter flips this formula, involving readers most intensely with the characters in the story within the story. His Dr. Twist tales set in London’s Hades club leave me with very little sense of identification with the club’s members, chief among them, aside from Twist, Superintendent Cullen, but I do get drawn right in to the mystery they’re about to solve. The characters in the mystery are brought to life through long passages of narration that go uninterrupted by questions or comments from the listeners. And in the account of the crime there are more direct than indirect reports of speech. (This can be a copyeditor’s nightmare—all those quotes within quotes, as the speaker recounts the exact words of others—but it’s something that creates more immediacy for the reader.) Halter’s attention to atmospheric, not just practical details of setting in the murder story is another important factor in making the murder and not the framing story the focus of our attention. Our February 2014 issue contains “Jacob’s Ladder,” an entry in this series whose inner story is set in a section of the French countryside that I can almost guarantee you won’t forget after reading Halter’s descriptions of it. (You’ll find other good examples of Halter’s use of setting in his story collection The Night of the Wolf.)

It’s largely a matter of taste, of course, which variation on this genre you prefer. I’m more inclined toward the type of story that lets me get inside the mystery itself and focuses less on the cleverness of those around the table. But there are pleasures in both forms. Focusing on the solvers, and treating the mystery more abstractly, creates a lighter sort of entertainment. One more suitable, when you think about it, to a dinner with friends.

Like the marketers who’ve turned our various fall and winter holidays into a single amorphous season, I’d like to wish everyone Happy Thanksgiving early, even if you haven’t yet finished the Halloween candy. I won’t be blogging again before the turkey’s carved, but for that day I wish you a dinner filled with mystery, and a guest as clever as Isaac or Dr. Twist.—Janet Hutchings

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“A Familiar Face” (by Tim L. Williams)

Posted on October 30, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Tim L. Williams is one of the best short-story writers to enter the mystery field over the past decade. His EQMM story “Half-Lives” won the International Thriller Award for best short story of 2011; he’s received two nominations for the Shamus Award, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories. He’s a professor by day, and his knowledge of crime fiction is extensive. You can follow him on Twitter @TimLWilliams1.—Janet Hutchings

When I was in my late teens and first setting out to write fiction, I woke to news that would chart the course of my writing life. A twenty-year-old girl whom I’d flirted with at parties and who was now dating a friend had been murdered. Corinna Mullen’s beat-up Pontiac had been found outside a municipal garage; a worker had spotted blood smears on the interior and the body had been discovered in the trunk. By noon nearly everyone in town either knew or claimed to know the specifics. For days the murder was all that people who waited in line at the IGA, pumped gas at the Red Ace filling station, or loaded up on stale Little Debbie snack cakes and two-day-old bread at the Colonial Bakery discount store could talk about. Mutilated was the word most often used. As it turned out, the gossip erred on the side of understatement. Calling what had been done to her mutilation was like saying that the South Pole is cool in wintertime or that a ghost chili is on the spicy side.

Understand. Central City was a small mining town of five thousand on the edge of the Western Kentucky coalfields, but it was a long way from Mayberry. This was a hard town where people settled arguments with their fists, where teenagers drank beer and cheap wine and died in fiery car crashes, where bad things happened to people all the time. It wasn’t the fact of the murder or its grisly details or even the shock that came from knowing the victim, but the identity of the murderers that changed the assumptions I’d always made about life.

Since all of this occurred during the first great wave of America’s obsession with serial killers, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the local media, my neighbors, and I latched onto the idea that there was a genuine, honest-to-God serial killer in our midst. Surely, we believed, this was a faceless Michael Myers or an ingenious Hannibal Lecter who had intruded into our lives. But then the suspects were named, three of whom would later be convicted. One was a local police officer who often stopped by to drink coffee with my father, another a distant cousin of mine who was an infamous bully, and the third a casual acquaintance whom I’d once seen weep for a half an hour when his Beagle-mix puppy had been hit by car. Their acts were monstrous, but I knew for a fact that they weren’t monsters, or at least not in the sense that I understood the word.

In his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler speaks of giving “murder back to the kind of people who commit it . . .” The thunderclap of realization that came to me was that people who committed horribly brutal murders were people I knew, people I understood, people who weren’t all that different from the image I saw in the mirror.

In time I realized that the mystery and suspense novels I liked the most had villains who were completely and undeniably human. Even more than that, they were villains who seemed little different from the people I interacted with every day. Back then, it was the stories and novels of James M. Cain, most of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series, the early Matthew Scudder novels from Lawrence Block, a handful of Patricia Highsmith’s darkly ironic short stories, and a couple of Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley novels that I kept returning to. Don’t get me wrong. I had and have a special place in my heart for Hannibal Lecter, the SPECTRE organization, and, of course, Professor Moriarty, that grandfather of all supervillains, but it is still the question of how such inhuman actions can be committed by such ordinary human beings that I find myself drawn to as both a writer and a reader.

What I’m talking about is a particular form of realism, I suppose. The verisimilitude of evil might be a suitable term. For me it is a realism that transcends genre and niche. When I read, I’m drawn to books and stories, whether they be hardboiled or cozy or noir or thrillers, with an antagonist or antagonists who are as human as my next door neighbor. Now let me make a confession. I don’t know a single movie star or mafia boss, but I’ve read books and stories about both that I absolutely cherish. These books have villains who are as familiar and identifiable as the woman in neon green sweatpants in line at Walmart. No matter the setting or social milieu, the story or novel that truly captures my interest is one that makes clear that even the worst of us is undeniably one of us.

Daniel Woodrell’s novels are wonderful examples of what I mean. Read The Death of Sweet Mister, and you’ll understand. The “villain” in that book is not only believable and utterly real, his motivations are heartbreakingly understandable. The same holds true for Larry Brown’s Joe or Father and Son. The spectacularly violent and ruthless characters who populate Frank Bill’s remarkable collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana, provide a perfect illustration of the type of ordinary evil I’m talking about. Bill makes us recognize, understand, and condemn, all in one fell swoop, men who molest children, betray their families, and cherish their meager possessions to the point where they are willing to commit murder over a hunting dog. This is a brutal, ugly, poverty-plagued world that is as familiar as the rusting coal shovels, trash-strewn fields, and cottonmouth-infested slews of my hometown, or any other rural area where drugs and despair are as common as Super Walmarts and EBT cards. While Bill’s stories are often exaggerations of the violence at the heart of “fly-over country,” they reflect its spirit and capture the darkest aspect of what Henry James referred to as “felt life” in a way that no documentary can. The situations, the characters, and their actions are extreme, but anyone who doesn’t believe that these people are real has never watched a nineteen-year-old murderer cradle his broken-backed puppy nor visited a West Kentucky dive bar late on a Saturday night.

While most of the fiction I’ve mentioned is what reviewers are fond of calling “country noir,” I certainly don’t mean to imply that this verisimilitude of evil is confined to a particular subgenre. Tommy Tillary of Lawrence Block’s Scudder novel, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, the low-level, seedy mafia associates of Shane Stevens’ Dead City and the lost, desperate-to-have-a home sociopaths of Charles Willeford’s Miami Blues and Sideswipe are just three urban examples of these thoroughly human monsters that have always been a source of fascination and horror for me. Don’t get me wrong. I still love the shiver that comes from reading about the nearly superhuman villain who spins a web of ingenious evil. One of the things about crime and mystery fiction that I treasure the most is its infinite variety, its ability to let us visit English country estates or the mean streets of Los Angeles and New York or the back roads of the rural south or even the palaces of ancient Rome. To me the genre is like a city that is alive and growing with new arrivals. However, as a writer and reader, my particular neighborhood, the place I call home, is one in which the evil we meet is as flawed and conflicted and human as the protagonist.

Years ago when one of the perpetrators of that horrible murder in my hometown was convicted, his wife stood outside the courthouse saying over and over that, “He wouldn’t have done this. He’s a good father, a good man. He even bakes our daughter’s birthday cakes.” This was pretty much the refrain of everyone who knew the murderers. This good father who baked birthday cakes, this bully who loved his mother, this classmate who had once cradled a dying puppy in his arms had committed a crime so horrible that a number of people who attended the trial grew physically ill at the crime-scene photos. Corinna Mullen had been beaten, gang raped, tortured, and left in a car trunk to die. They couldn’t have done this. But they did.

The question of how ordinary people can commit such horrific acts is for me the ultimate mystery, and one that perhaps no other genre can address as well as crime and suspense fiction. When it does, it has a power and depth that can resonate long after a page is turned or a book closed. God knows that even after all these years the thing that brings me back to the genre again and again is that horrifying moment when we look into the face of the monster and are forced to realize that it is one which might belong to a neighbor or a friend or even the reflection we see in the mirror.

Posted in Books, Characters, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Noir, Novels, Setting, Thrillers, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“The Lee Strasberg Method School of Writing” (by Hilary Davidson)

Posted on October 23, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Hilary Davidson was a travel journalist and the author of eighteen nonfiction books in that field before she turned to fiction writing. Two of her three mystery novels featuring travel-writer sleuth Lily Moore are set in foreign locations, as are some of her short stories, most notably “Darkness in the City of Light,” in EQMM’s November 2013 issue.  But she did not choose to write about setting—the external element in fiction—for this post; instead, she takes a look at what it sometimes takes to get inside a character.  And this Anthony Award winning writer, who will soon see the publication of her first standalone thriller, Blood Always Tells, is as good at breathing life into her characters as she is at conveying place.  Readers looking for short-story collections won’t want to miss Hilary’s The Black Widow Club. —Janet Hutchings

Years ago, when I was an intern at Harper’s Magazine in New York, I lived in a Salvation Army residence in Gramercy Park, at the corner of Irving Place and East Twentieth Street. It was an old-fashioned hotel for ladies, not unlike the residence in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (there was even a genteel parlor on the first floor for entertaining gentlemen callers; men weren’t allowed on the other floors of the building). The residence was filled with actresses who were studying at the Lee Strasberg School, which was nearby. I often came home in the evening to find them involved in dubious exercises, which I was sometimes roped into. The purpose of the exercises was to answer one question, which I heard daily: “What would motivate me to behave in the way the character does?”

While the exercises themselves sometimes baffled me (it’s strange to watch someone suddenly dissolve in tears for no apparent reason, then smile again a minute later), I was intrigued by the theory behind it. While stimulating memories and re-creating emotions to bring these feelings to a role seemed a little extreme, I was curious about getting into a character’s head. My actor friends let me borrow books to understand how it worked. This was how Lee Strasberg described his Method approach to acting:

The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the same thing on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage.

It made sense, intuitively speaking, but it sounded like exhausting work. If an actor needed to dig deep inside his or her psyche to discover the roots of a character’s motivation, wouldn’t that leave the actor exhausted after each performance? When my internship ended, I left New York, and didn’t give another thought to Lee Strasberg or the Method for years. But it came back to haunt me when I started writing fiction.

I didn’t realize it at first. I was a professional journalist, so I was used to writing every day, but for a long time, I couldn’t understand why it took me roughly the same amount of time to write 500 words of fiction versus 2,000 words of an article for a magazine. I discovered that characters and stories took up more space in my brain than I ever imagined. I found myself emotionally tied to the characters on the page, so that if they were angry or frustrated or upset, my emotional state mirrored theirs. I wondered why I couldn’t easily leave those emotions behind on the page. Eventually it dawned on me: I was unconsciously using Lee Strasberg’s Method to write. I was putting myself through the same paces to write a character as my actor friends did to play a role.

It made a lot of sense, when I started to unravel it. What interests me most about a character is his or her psychological makeup. What causes someone to make a terrible choice? What trigger pushes a person to the brink? What’s damaged this person in the past, and what are they trying to hide? This is true for me whether I’m writing a short story or a novel. I want to know what’s underneath a character’s façade.

I wasn’t conscious of deliberately calling up memories to create realistic reactions until I’d written about two-thirds of my first novel, The Damage Done. I knew that the main character, Lily Moore, was claustrophobic, but when I tried to write about her terrified reaction to being locked in a small room, none of it felt very convincing to me. I tried to do it, but I couldn’t channel her terror at the situation. Finally, I focused on calling up a memory of feeling powerless and trapped. For me, that happened while I was scuba diving in the St. Lawrence River, and I lost my dive buddy underwater. The visibility was so bad that I couldn’t see more than ten feet around me, and I had no idea whether she’d been swept away by a current, or if she’d sunk further down. I searched for her, getting more panicked as each second ticked away. Rapid breathing uses up your oxygen supply quickly, causing further panic. Never before in my life had I felt so hopelessly trapped. That was how I finally figured out how to write about claustrophobia, and it helped me understand Lily so much better.

Since then, I’ve embraced the Method approach to writing, even though Lee Strasberg never intended it for use that way. Strasberg liked to say, “The actor creates with his own flesh and blood all those things which all the arts try in some way to describe.” But, in my mind, the goals of Method Acting and writing fiction are surprisingly similar: to make what’s in front of your audience’s eyes come alive so that it feels as real to them as it does to you.

Posted in Characters, Editing, Fiction, Guest | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“It’s the Heart that Counts” (by Evan Lewis)

Posted on October 16, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Evan Lewis won the Robert L. Fish Award for best short story by a new American author for his February 2010 EQMM story “Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man,” a humorous tale about a detective who believes himself to be the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Since then, we’ve bought two more Hobbs stories for EQMM, the latest for our February 2014 issue. The author’s choice of topic for this post interested me as soon as I heard what it was going to be, since one of the things that sets his homages to Holmes apart from most others we see is the warmth we are made to feel for the characters. Even the lampooned characters, including Holmes wannabe Hobbs, are all too human. The Portland author has another series running in our sister publication, AHMM, starring a modern-day descendant of frontiersman Davy Crockett, and he provides links to some of his other short stories on his blog, Davy Crockett’s Almanac of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West. —Janet Hutchings

How many times have you read a mystery story with an intriguing character, an unusual crime, and an ingenious solution—but reached the end only mildly satisfied?

In many cases, that’s a story where the author has done everything right—everything but the most important thing, to appeal to readers’ emotions.

At last year’s Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, entertainment researcher and consultant Gene Del Vecchio gave a presentation based on his book, Creating Blockbusters. Though the book focuses primarily on filmmaking, his research relates to all forms of storytelling. His studies show that while men, women, and children differ on what types of heroes, villains, conflicts, and themes they prefer, they all have pretty much the same emotional needs. And according to Mr. Del Vecchio, satisfying people’s deep desires is the single most important element of crafting successful entertainment.

Or, as he puts it, “It’s about EMOTION, stupid!”

For mystery writers, that’s an important reminder. While clever plotting is to be commended, the best stories are ultimately about people, and how the story’s events make them feel.

Surprisingly, few books on writing devote much space to the subject. There are entire volumes devoted to plot structure, scene building, conflict, dialogue, and characterization, but I’ve yet to see one focusing on emotion. And to my way of thinking, it’s heart, more than any other factor, that determines whether a story succeeds or fails.

“Heart” does not mean sappy sentimentalism, of course. It means connecting with readers on an emotional level by satisfying one or more basic human desire. We all want love and friendship, self-fulfillment, and the self-esteem that comes from success, appreciation, winning, freedom, and recognition. Under certain circumstances, we might also crave power, glory, or revenge. Thankfully for writers, each of those basic desires can be met in many ways, offering plenty of emotional ammunition.

The writer’s job is to hook onto one of those desires and place it at the core of the story. As the story plays out, fulfilling the protagonist’s emotional need, readers will be fulfilled as well. One way to achieve that is with a character arc, transforming the hero from loser to winner, weak to strong, sad to happy, poor to rich, cowardly to brave, lonely to loved, etc. The rewards for such personal change may be internal, giving the protagonist confidence, independence, or redemption. But they can also be external, bringing respect, admiration, or love from other characters.

We all have a deep-seated desire to improve ourselves—or our lot in life—but in reality, such changes usually come about over a long period, requiring plenty of trial and error. In fiction, we can deliver that kind of emotional satisfaction within the space of a few pages, allowing readers to imagine that such change is possible in their own lives.

While we all strive to be better, most of us also have a contrary streak that secretly yearns to be bad. This offers other opportunities for emotional wish fulfillment. A rebellious character can break rules, conventions, and even laws and get away with it. In real life, most people refrain, fearing the consequences. So seeing a fictional character misbehave and thrive provides an emotional charge. It’s this charge that has made the loveable rogue such an iconic character.

When characters go too far, giving in to their baser natures, we can relate to that, too. The five deadliest sins—greed, anger, envy, lust, and pride—are emotional minefields. They provide great motives for fictional criminals. And while seeing those criminals punished for their crimes is satisfying, it can be even more satisfying knowing we’ve dodged a bullet by not succumbing to those sins ourselves.

Writing coaches are great champions of conflict. Some want to see it on every page, every line, or every word. That’s great advice, because conflict drives the story and defines character. But conflict for its own sake will only take the story so far. Conflict between enemies—or even strangers—is much less powerful than conflict between friends, loved ones, and family members. Harsh words and warring agendas that threaten close personal relationships send a jolt to readers’ hearts because they hold those relationships so dear.

Now let’s talk about death.

In the old-fashioned whodunit, a murder was simply an inciting incident. The dead person was just a problem to be solved. But in real life, death really sucks. We’ve all lost someone—a parent, a friend, a spouse, a family member, even a pet—and nothing packs a greater emotional wallop. That loss leaves an emptiness that never completely heals. By keeping that in mind, and pouring those feelings onto the page, we can make our readers feel it too.

While death is the ultimate loss, many lesser forms pack a punch. We all fear situations that threaten our emotional needs. If the story’s hero is in danger of going from strong to weak, rich to poor, winner to loser, or loved to unloved, readers will feel the threat, because they face it in their own lives. Think of it as a reverse character arc. Threats to personal safety and survival can be equally emotional if we’ve given our characters enough to live for and given our readers enough reason to care.

While fear of loss can provide motivation for a hero, it can also supply a strong and relatable motive for a criminal. A character who sees his world slipping away and takes illegal action to salvage it is not a villain—it’s a person under great stress who must examine their priorities and make a tough decision. That’s a character who speaks to the heart of all of us.

Ultimately, appealing to our readers’ hearts means making them feel that on some level the story is about them. By making them feel that our protagonists’ triumphs, failures, joys and heartaches are their own, we give them an experience they’ll remember, and keep them coming back for more.

Posted in Adventure, Books, Characters, Editing, Fiction, Guest, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“What’s in a Name?” (by Charles Ardai)

Posted on October 9, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen
Charles Ardai has deep roots in nearly every area of the mystery field: He once worked in the subsidiary rights department for our fiction magazines (EQMM, AHMM, Analog, and Asimov’s), and in that capacity he edited and co-edited many short-story anthologies. He went on to co-found his own publishing company, Hard Case Crime, which recently had a number one New York Times bestseller with Stephen King’s novel Joyland. He’s an award-winning writer of both novels and short stories in our genre, and more recently he’s moved on to television, currently as writer/producer on the series Haven.  His topic for this post is approached from a writer’s standpoint, but also from that of a publisher, and it’s worth noting, since he talks about the work of Michael Crichton, that eight long-lost Crichton novels will be published by Hard Case Crime this month.—Janet Hutchings

When he was a student at Harvard Medical School, John Michael Crichton (later known better to the world after the surgical removal of his first name—much like the process that turned John Ross Macdonald into just Ross Macdonald, except that his real name was Kenneth Millar) wrote eight novels as John Lange.

Why? I’ve heard conflicting stories, only some of them from the man himself. Wikipedia points out that Crichton was abnormally tall—close to seven feet—and that “lange” means “long” in German. Maybe so. It’s true that he also wrote one book in the same period as Jeffrey Hudson, and Jeffrey Hudson was apparently the name of a dwarf in seventeenth- century England, so height does seems to have been on his mind. But that only speaks to the choice of pseudonyms, not to the choice to use a pseudonym in the first place.

Some say that he was concerned that Harvard would look unfavorably on one of their students spending enough time away from his studies to write paperback potboilers; some, that it was the content of those potboilers that worried him: plenty of sex and violence and unrepentant criminality and other conduct unbecoming a Harvard man (or anyway that Harvard might like to think of as such).

But I wonder. In the same period, he wrote and published his first big bestseller, The Andromeda Strain, and that was under his real name. Of course, the John Lange novels were somewhat sexier than The Andromeda Strain, and there were more of them. So maybe the other explanations have some truth. You can certainly imagine an academic advisor calling young John Michael on the carpet and asking, “Twelve novels in six years? Where do you find the time?”

But what I suspect is that he simply found the practice of writing under a pseudonym liberating. Particularly in the early stages of his career, when he was first trying things out. You see elements in the Lange novels that he would develop more fully elsewhere. In Drug of Choice, for instance, he has a mysterious Caribbean island where bioengineers have developed something extraordinary and plan to use it as the basis for a vacation resort like none the world has ever seen before. Is it cloned dinosaurs? No, it’s a drug, which may be why he called this book Drug of Choice and saved Jurassic Park for another one twenty years later. But you can see the germ taking root. Could he have written his bestseller The Great Train Robbery in 1975 if he hadn’t written the heist novel ODDS ON back in ’66 or the tomb-robbing adventure Easy Go in ’68? Well, sure, he could—but those gave him a trial run of sorts, free from the burdens of authorship. It wasn’t Michael Crichton, summa cum laude Harvard man, visiting lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge, whose name was on these things and whose reputation was consequently on the line. It was this Lange fellow, and surely he was impossible to embarrass. From all the evidence he was a bon vivant playboy who dashed off his risqué entertainments between trips to the French Riviera. And even if the reality was that he was a workaday novelist in Brooklyn, tapping away at the old Remington to make the mortgage payments, at least he was his own man, and had his own reputation to establish or to burn.

This all came to mind recently not only because I was working on preparing the eight Lange novels for their first republication in decades, and their first ever under the author’s real name, but because as I was doing this the news broke about J.K. Rowling having published a hardboiled private eye novel under the nom de plume Robert Galbraith.

Is The Cuckoo’s Calling any good? Yes. It’s a first-rate crime novel. Certainly nothing to be embarrassed by, nothing an author should feel the need to hide. And Rowling is anything but a first-time author, taking her tentative first steps into the world of publishing. But isn’t that precisely the point? As J.K. Rowling she has a reputation, and people have expectations about her books. The pressure involved must be crushing, and if there’s one thing that inhibits creativity it’s performance anxiety. What will people think? can be a paralyzing question even when you’re no one at all and not a living soul cares a whit what you do or don’t write. Now imagine if every reader on the planet knows your name and most of them have an opinion about your work. Imagine that you’re a lifelong fan of mystery novels but have never properly written one yourself (some of the Harry Potter books have elements of mystery fiction to them—but that’s not the same as an honest-to-God mystery novel). You want to write one, but you know the scrutiny it will be under. Apart from the question of whether the book will get a fair shake, there’s the question of whether you can put pen to paper and write it at all. I doubt I could. It would feel like having a roomful of people staring over my shoulder, muttering while I tried to decide between “he said” and “said he.”

So: Galbraith is born. A bluff and hearty sort, thoroughly male, military veteran, and unimpeachably not J.K. Rowling. And suddenly Jo Rowling is free! To write what she will how she will, and if it falls flat on its face, so be it. To mix metaphors, it’s Galbraith’s face the egg will land on, not hers. The consequence: a book that might easily have been strangled in its crib (or read as if it should have been) comes out beautifully.

I myself have had this experience. My first novel, Little Girl Lost, was nominated for the Edgar and Shamus Awards; its sequel, Songs of Innocence, won the Shamus; and I didn’t write either of them. I couldn’t. I tried—but I hit a wall after the first chapter of the first book, and ten years passed while I stared at those three pages and found myself unable to add a fourth. So what did I do? I farmed the work out to an unsavory fellow named Richard Aleas. (What’s that? His name is an anagram of mine? So it is.) He seemed to be the worst sort of workaday hack, the kind who’d write anything for the price of a pack of smokes and a pint of Makers Mark. And the book wasn’t going anywhere in my hands, so why not let Aleas take a crack at it?

Well, let me tell you. Old Aleas really tore the place up. And why? Because he had nothing to lose. He could write freely, unafraid of the consequences. So your book isn’t Ulysses, so the prose isn’t deathless, so the Nobel committee won’t leap to the red phone in Stockholm and shout the Swedish equivalent of “Stop the presses!” So what? The job of writing is writing, putting one word in front of another, and Aleas could do that.

And, as it turns out, he did it well. At least he did it well enough. And he had fun doing it, and learned a lot, and taught some of what he learned to that sluggard Ardai, who trailed along in his wake trying to keep up.

Michael Crichton went on to write better books as himself than he did as John Lange. But the Lange books are great fun, and he was justifiably proud of them. They gave him a priceless apprenticeship, and he wouldn’t have become the writer he became without them. Just like Lawrence Block, who started out writing as Sheldon Lord and Andrew Shaw and Chip Harrison and Lee Duncan; just like Donald Westlake, who was Alan Marshall and Tucker Coe and Richard Stark; just like Evan Hunter, who was Richard Marsten and Curt Cannon before he became Ed McBain (and who was actually born Salvatore Lombino); just like Martin Cruz Smith was Simon Quinn and Stephen King was Richard Bachman; just like all those others, Crichton was able to learn his craft and experiment with a wide variety of topics and themes and styles, all with the liberty that comes from having a disposable second identity. You don’t have to own up to the work now or ever—and that frees you to do good work.

When I launched Hard Case Crime and approached Michael to ask him about reissuing the Lange books—something he’d refused to do previously—I didn’t have high hopes. But he saw what our books looked like and what sort of stories we were telling and he got caught up in the spirit of the thing. His one request: We could reprint the books, but while he was alive we weren’t to breathe a word to anyone about who the author really was. This freed him once again to have some fun. No one was more surprised than me when, while we were working on re-editing Zero Cool, he emailed me a new pair of chapters he’d written to bookend the old story. It was the first new writing John Lange had done in 36 years, and Michael was tickled to death to have done it.

When does a Michael Crichton get to just play? A J.K. Rowling? To sling words without a care, to write for writing’s sake? Answer: When they’re starting out or starting over. When they’re able to shed who they are and be someone else.

As writers, we create characters—it’s what we do. And we should never forget that the first one we create for any book is the one whose name appears on the spine.

Posted in Anthologies, Books, Fiction, Genre, Guest, Novels, Publishing, Thrillers, Writers | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

THE IMPORTANCE OF STORY

Posted on October 2, 2013 by somethingisgoingtohappen

Last week in Albany, New York, 1,500 readers, writers, editors, agents, and booksellers gathered for the 44th Bouchercon World Mystery convention. Bouchercons provide opportunities for authors to enjoy the company of other authors, and for business connections to be made, but more importantly, they’re a place for readers to talk about mysteries, meet some of the authors of their favorite series, attend panels on a number of topics relating to the genre (and to fiction generally), and discover new books.

I’ve found that being in the company of fans who read prolifically but are neither writers nor publishing people serves as a good reminder of what it is we’re all doing. In the end, it’s not about sales, publicity, movie deals, or awards: It’s about the need we all have for a good story.

I doubt it would be possible to find anyone in the modern world who does not enjoy the benefits of storytelling in one or another of its forms. The pool of fiction readers may have shrunk over the past few decades—TV and movies may have become the primary purveyors of stories—but the fictional arts remain an inextricable part of our lives. And that’s a good thing.

If you want to imagine what life would be like without storytelling, read Dickens’s Hard Times, with its merciless portrayal of the consequences of the pedagogy of that unforgettable character Mr. Gradgrind: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” In that novel, the outcome for the boys and girls raised according to Gradgrind’s philosophy is disastrous. It’s fortunate that such an experiment would be virtually impossible to carry out in the real world—at least nowadays. I’ve known parents who believe their children should read only nonfiction, and children who claim to have no interest in fiction. “Reality” shows have replaced many of the network TV spots formerly held by dramas or situation comedies. All of this is lamentable, but the producers of reality shows are good marketers: They know they’ve got to create a storyline for their “real” characters in order to hold an audience, and they do. They subtly fictionalize real lives in the process.

The children in Hard Times become incomplete, profoundly unhappy adults. Dickens focuses on various ways in which they’re deprived of an imaginative life in childhood; being forbidden to attend entertainments such as the circus, which they sneak out to see, is one. Dickens is concerned with the imaginative life in a wider sense than can be encapsulated entirely by the concept of storytelling, but I think it could be argued that all other imaginative experiences relate at least tangentially to the construction of a story. I’m reminded in this regard of Thomas Wolfe’s short story “Circus at Dawn,” about two boys who go to watch a circus setting up. Towards the end of the story the narrator says “ . . . we would turn our fascinated stares again upon these splendid and romantic creatures, whose lives were so different from our own, and whom we seemed to know with such familiar and affectionate intimacy.” Now isn’t that just how we expect to know a character in fiction—with familiar and affectionate intimacy? Part of the fascination of the circus for the boys in this story is that it inspires them to imaginatively construct stories about people they don’t, and won’t, ever really know—to create, in other words, a fictional narrative.

Dickens’s insight that the free play of imagination is essential to human health and happiness has been given a utilitarian twist in our time. It’s been argued that one of the benefits of having children read fiction is that it helps create an imaginative empathy with other people—particularly people of other races and cultures—and that societal good must result from this. Others have seen the benefit of fiction as a sort of personal therapy, for reader as well as writer—the working out imaginatively of real-world problems. I don’t dispute that fiction can help achieve these and many other positive outcomes. It can, and it’s a good thing that it can. But I think there’s something much more fundamental involved in our need for storytelling.

I was unable to attend the Bouchercon interview of International Guest of Honor Anne Perry, but I got a report of some of the things she said from someone who was there, including the story she told of meeting a reader who told her she was saving a couple of Perry’s books “for when she really needed them.” The reader, apparently, was in extremely poor health. What she must have meant by her remark, I think, is that she was saving the books she most expected to enjoy for a time when she needed most to be lifted imaginatively out of her life. Dickens’s insight, it seems to me, was that it’s not just people in dire straits who need a means of being lifted out of the real or “factual.” We all need it. We can’t remain forever on the plane of reality: There isn’t enough mental space there for us to flourish.

Which brings me back to Bouchercon, whose many devoted readers reminded me that we are, in fact, doing something that’s more important than making money or achieving fame. We’re involved, as writers, editors, publishers, and booksellers, in bringing people something essential to their lives. And that’s true, I think, whether the stories we’re writing, publishing, or selling are so-called “literary” creations or what critics used to call “mere entertainments.”—Janet Hutchings

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