Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

For a little over a year, I've been attending the monthly meetings of a mystery book club at my local independent bookstore. It's been a lot of fun, particularly since they tend to choose books that don't quite match my normal reading tastes, with a strong emphasis on recent cozies and domestic thrillers. It's always good to read outside your comfort zone.

This month, though, the club made one of its periodic forays into classic territory, with Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train. Several members, it turned out, are Christie enthusiasts who have read all her works, often more than once, while others were encountering her for the first time. This led the group to consider an interesting question: what book did the hardcore Christie fans think would make the best introduction to her work for a new reader?

I immediately thought this would make good fodder for a SleuthSayers column. Considering some of my own favorite writers and series characters, what one book would I choose for a new reader, and why? What story would best capture what I loved about that author, and be most likely to bring the newbie back for more? 

So here's how I'd answer the question for ten (or nine, depending on how you count) members of my personal pantheon. 

REX STOUT: I've written before about my love for Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and the Manhattan brownstone they call home. This is definitely a series where I wouldn't give a new reader book #1 to start with. Fer-de-Lance is a fine novel, and Wolfe himself is already there almost complete, but I don't think Stout had yet refined Archie's voice. Given how important the brownstone is to what I find most appealing about the books, I'd also eliminate the entries where Wolfe ventures out into the wider world, though some of those (Some Buried Caesar, Too Many Cooks) are excellent. Ultimately, my choice would be And Be A Villain, in which a man is murdered during a live radio broadcast. Wolfe and Archie are at their sharpest, the key supporting characters are present in fine form, and the mystery itself is satisfyingly complex, with a surprising resolution. Some would object to this choice on the basis that the novel is the beginning of the "Zeck trilogy," introducing the only recurring villain in the Wolfe stories, but I think the book stands up fine on its own.

AGATHA CHRISTIE: It means forgoing the pleasures of Poirot, but in my view there's no finer way to meet Dame Agatha than And Then There Were None (hey, are all my choices going to start with "and"?). What's not to love? A fiendishly clever plot with plenty of inventive twists, an incredible setting, a cast of memorably nasty characters--everything great about Christie is on full view here, including the darkly cynical tone that gives her work such lasting depth. The atmosphere in this one is anything but cozy, and there's a reason writers are still ripping this premise off after almost a century. Now, if you must have Poirot and his little gray cells? It may be too easy an answer, but I'd have to go with Murder on the Orient Express. (If you must have Miss Marple, you must ask someone else, as the character's never done much for me.)

ROBERT B. PARKER: I've also written before about how formative the Spenser novels were for me when I began reading adult crime fiction. I still relish them, but there are particular challenges in introducing them to a new reader. The first Spenser, The Godwulf Manuscript, isn't much more than a Chandler pastiche, with little indication of what would later make the character distinctive. The second, God Save the Child, introduces Susan Silverman, but is one of several early books in the series with gender politics that have aged very poorly. The book I've reread most often, A Catskill Eagle, relies heavily on the reader's prior knowledge of Spenser and Susan's relationship. So my recommendation for the reader new to Spenser is The Judas Goat, in which our man goes to Europe to track down a group of terrorists. The case is fast-paced and exciting, and Spenser is formidable without yet being the invincible superman he'd be in the later books. The climatic showdown, at the 1980 Montreal Olympics, is a terrific action sequence. Most importantly, the book has the lively, funny interactions between Spenser and Hawk that are usually the highlights of any Spenser outing.

RICHARD STARK: Once again, I've written before of my devotion to Stark's novels about the coldly efficient professional thief Parker, for my money the best series of crime novels ever written. They're all great, but I think one perfect entry point is The Score, in which Parker joins a gang with a seemingly foolproof plan to rob every business in a small mining town in a single night. As always, things go wrong, and the pleasure comes from watching Parker scramble to deal with the multiple complications and still walk away with the loot. In addition to the novel, the comic book adaptation by the late, great Darwyn Cooke is most definitely worth seeking out.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Stark, of course, was a penname of Westlake's. While Stark's Parker novels are the best straight crime books ever written, Westlake used his own name on the Dortmunder series, about a thief cursed with the worst luck of anyone in the genre, and darned if they're not, by a mile, the best comic crime capers. It's kind of not fair that one guy should be so damn good at both. I think most Dortmunder fans would recommend new readers simply start with the first book, The Hot Rock, but I'd actually go with a much later entry, Drowned Hopes. Here, an ex-con recruits Dortmunder and his regular crew of misfits to help with an unusual problem: the town where he buried his loot is now underwater, thanks to a dam built while he was in prison. Worth the price of admission just for the scene where Dortmunder tries scuba diving. For bonus points, the novel also includes an unusual crossover: in one chapter, the characters from Joe Gores's DKA series make an appearance. Gores and Westlake cowrote the chapter, which also appears in the DKA novel 32 Cadillacs. So this book can actually introduce you to two top-tier crime series!

JOHN D. MACDONALD: Just as Hawk is vital to the best entries in the Spenser series, so the most memorable books about Travis McGee, MacDonald's "salvage consultant" hero, tend to be the ones with the most involvement from Meyer, the philosophically inclined economist who serves as McGee's unlikely best friend. So while it might seem perverse to choose the next-to-last novel in the series as an entry point, I'd still go with Cinnamon Skin, in which Meyer is central to the plot and present in almost every scene. When Meyer's beloved niece and her new husband are killed in a boat explosion, he and McGee set off on a cross-country quest to find and punish the guilty party. There's some great detective work in this one, and a memorably cold-blooded bad guy. Of course, the McGee books are only a fraction of the work put out by the highly prolific MacDonald. For a non-series taste, try The Executioners, which has been the basis of three (increasingly unfaithful) filmed versions under the title Cape Fear.

ED MCBAIN: Choosing a starting point for the 87th Precinct novels is just about impossible, partly because of the sheer scope of the series (55 novels over fifty years!), partly because it features a sprawling ensemble cast instead of a single hero. There are a few plot threads which run through several novels--Detective Steve Carella's relationship with his wife, the recurring villain The Deaf Man--but by and large you can read the series in pretty much any order. It's been persuasively argued that the books really constitute a single long novel, one of the greatest ever written about New York City (thinly fictionalized as Isola in McBain's universe). McBain didn't invent the police procedural, but the 87th Precinct is surely the grandest incarnation of the form in mystery fiction. Forced to choose an introduction, I might go with Eight Black Horses, in which the Deaf Man returns to exact revenge. It's got a clever plot and shows the main characters at their most human--but I might be choosing it just because it's one of the ones I've most recently reread.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: Two of the greatest figures in the history of the American PI were introduced in the 1970s. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is the paragon: well-read, absolutely committed to an admirable code of honor, a superb cook, irresistible to women, and very nearly undefeatable with either a gun or his fists. As much as I love Parker's writing, by the last third or so of the series, Spenser had become essentially superhuman, impervious even to aging, and the endless scenes of him and Susan congratulating each other on the perfection of their relationship had gotten a little old. Spenser's contemporary, Block's Matt Scudder, is a much different, and ultimately much more human and thus more compelling, character. Scudder tries to do the right thing, but he's deeply flawed, most notably by his alcoholism, which remains a central theme of the series even after he joins AA and sobers up. You could start the series from the beginning, but to jump in at a point where Block has fully mastered Scudder's voice and world, go with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a flashback novel set during Scudder's drinking days that features a compelling plot and one of the all-time great titles.

SUE GRAFTON: Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. There's no doubt that Grafton got better with experience, but there's also no doubt that her "alphabet" series about California PI Kinsey Milhone was strong from the start. Watching Milhone's character develop over the course of the series is one of its main pleasures, and best appreciated if you're with her from the start of her journey: "A" is for Alibi. It's not a perfect book (you'll see the end coming a mile away), but it will make you eager to spend more time with the character. It remains a tragedy that the series never reached Z. 

STUART M. KAMINSKY: The (IMHO) underappreciated Kaminsky had several series characters, including Florida process server Lew Fonesca, Chicago cop Abe Leiberman, and Moscow inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. I frequently return to them all with pleasure, but my favorite is Toby Peters, a down-on-his luck PI working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Peters works for a different celebrity in every book, and Kaminsky, an accomplished film scholar in his professional life, fleshes out the stories with rich detail about the period and the biographies of the real-life figures Peters encounters. As in all of Kaminsky's series, there's an expansive and highly entertaining cast of supporting characters and an engaging combination of melancholy and humor. Mostly because it's where I started, I'd direct new readers to the second Peters entry, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.

Agree? Disagree? Who are your favorites, and what do you think would make the most effective starting points for readers new to them?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Edited by Adam Meyer, In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis came out from Down & Out Books last year, shortly before that publisher went, well, down and out. As a result, the book never got the attention it deserved. I'm delighted that, earlier this month, a new edition of the book was published by Audecyn Books, and is now available in both print and electronic editions. It's a great set of crime stories, including contributions from my fellow SleuthSayers Stacy Woodson, Michael Bracken, and Barb Goffman. My story, "Just a Job to Do," is about a bodyguard, assigned to a mobster's wife, who develops her own ideas about what protection really means. Don't miss your second chance at this one!

Novel Ventures

For several decades now, I have been known as, and have actively worked at being, a short-story writer.

But I wasn’t always.

Early in my career, I wrote a few novels, and most of them are still available and still generating royalties. Today I’m looking back at those early-career novels.

DEADLY CAMPAIGN

I finished writing my first novel, a mystery titled Deadly Campaign, in November 1983. It was rejected by several agents and publishers until it found a home with Books in Motion and was released in May 1994.

Books in Motion published audiobooks on cassette tape and sold most of their titles at truck stops around the U.S.

In February 2003, Wildside Press released Deadly Campaign as a trade paperback, and it is still available at online bookstores.

Covering City Hall during an election year was all the excitement reporter Dan Fox needed—until he discovered Alderman Bill Franklin’s bullet-ridden body.

Who killed the alderman? Why did they do it? Fox wants the story. Everyone else wants him.

Hit men, mob bosses, politicians, and mistresses: They all have stories to tell, and Fox pieces them together while dodging bullets and fighting deadlines.

While Fox digs for the story, long-hidden secrets rise to the surface—secrets that threaten the political fabric of the city—and Fox soon discovers he’s caught in the middle of a Deadly Campaign.

JUST IN TIME FOR LOVE

I wrote Just in Time for Love, a YA romance, in 1983/1984, and for years the manuscript made the rounds of agents and publishers, finally finding a home with Hardshell Word Factory in 1998, first as an eBook and then in 2001 paired with Melissa Ford’s His Friday Girls as half of the paperback Twin Spins #1.

It is now out of print.

His father writes confessions and jokes, and the biggest joke of all is his name—Justin Tyme. But Jay, as he prefers to be called, hasn’t had much to laugh about in the years since his mother died. His father retreats into an alcohol-hazed world of denial and self-pity, reversing their care-giver roles, and forcing Jay to grow up virtually on his own.

Then, they move to O’Shea, where his father manages a mobile home park, and Jay begins yet another year as the “new kid” in school. He has a lot to learn—about life, his father, and himself, but most of all, about love. And it all begins the day Jay meets Cindy Hamilton.

PSI COPS

I wrote Psi Cops, a science fiction police procedural, in 1987/1988, and sent my first query to an editor in March 1988. I received several rejections and a request for revisions from an editor at Berkley (which I did, but they passed on the revised version), and I ultimately placed it with Books in Motion in 1994.

In February 2003, Wildside Press released Psi Cops as a trade paperback, and it is still available at online bookstores.

Geeks and freaks.

That’s what Detective Sergeant Tony Carvelli thinks of Psi Cops until he’s faced with a sadistic serial killer who leaves no evidence behind.

In a near-future St. Louis, after sexually-transmitted diseases have been eliminated and sex without commitment is a lifestyle for much of the population, Carvelli investigates the deaths of women dismembered in their own bedrooms.

Carvelli still believes in the old values: love before sex and investigation before technology. When Psi Cop Colleen Allison is assigned to the case against his wishes—thanks to his new partner, recently-promoted Detective Phil Palmer—Carvelli resents her and everything she represents.

Fighting against time and against each other, Carvelli, Palmer, and Allison struggle to find the killer before he strikes again.

ALL WHITE GIRLS

I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve lost the paper trail for my first private eye novel, All White Girls. So, I don’t know when I completed the novel, nor how many agents and publishers may have passed on it. I do know Wildside Press released it as a trade paperback in May 2001 and later released a hardcover version. It is still available at online bookstores.

One young woman is missing. Another is dead.

They were drawn to Windy City like moths to a flame, but the city’s bright lights can’t illuminate every dark corner. Hidden in the alleys and back streets and in a three-block-long stretch of strip clubs and adult bookstores are the men who prey on young women like these: the pedophiles, pimps, and pornographers.

When former partners, unlicensed investigator Big Dick Rickenbacher and Homicide Lieutenant Salvador Castellano, find their cases overlapping in this violent world of sexual depravity, old flames rekindle, old secrets finally surface, and old crimes demand retribution.

STUD

Sometime in the mid-2000s, I discovered the first chapter of an erotic romance I had drafted in the early 1990s. I picked it up again and finished writing Stud just before I sent my first query letter to an agent in September 2008.

I collected a string of rejections from agents and publishers for the next few years and finally released Stud in July 2011 as a Kindle-only title on Amazon, using my Rolinda Hay pseudonym.

Christiana Kern is already overworked as the top customer service representative at Wett, Inc., the country’s largest printer of special interest magazines, when her boss assigns her a new title. She isn’t eager to accept the additional responsibility…until she meets Bobby Ray Cartwright, the sexy rancher publishing the start-up magazine. It isn’t long before business and pleasure mix and Christiana learns that Stud isn’t just the title of Bobby Ray’s new publication. Soon Christiana is having the best sex ever and is facing life-altering decisions in and out of the bedroom.

SHORT STORY FOCUS

I’ve had many other books published—mostly short story collections—but I have no completed and unpublished novels buried in my files.

Given the length of time it took to write and find homes for each of my novels (11+ years for Deadly Campaign, 14+ years for Just in Time for Love, 6+ years for Psi Cops), is it any wonder I shifted my focus to short stories?

---

“The Tattooist” was published in Black Cat Weekly #253.

Words Haunt Me

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford – I've written about this one at length before.  See my blog post on it HERE.  All I can say is that I've never read another novel like it.  Twists and turns?  Try corkscrews and wormholes.  I still read it once a year, just to see how he did it.  

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940)

Meet the almost most dysfunctional, chaotic, insane family that has ever been, or at least written about.  Sam Pollitt is what would have happened if Alden Pyle from Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" had come back home, married, and had children.  They're both American bureaucrats, egoistic idealists, who love mankind, but...

(I can't help but compare Pollitt's mission in Malaya to Pyle's in Vietnam: disastrous, although Pollitt survives his.) 

The Pollitts have too many children (and Sam always wants more, and the question is why), too little money, too little love, devotion, faith, warmth or peace - and complete chaos.  It's a complete shit-show in lyrical prose.  

Jonathan Franzen said of it, "Its prose ranges from good to fabulously good — is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity — and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. And, worse yet, can never stop laughing at that violence!. . .The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours."  Then again, maybe it is.

MY NOTE:  I can say that last line because years ago, I met a family straight from hell.  They were the parents of the man I'd left Los Angeles with, and they explained so much.  A family where the parents were both alcoholic drug addicts who were in their 60s and looked at least 30 years older than that.  The parents regularly took off, abandoning their 4, maybe 5 children.  The state would come get the kids, eventually, put them in orphanages and/or fostercare, and then the parents would come staggering back, semi-sober, pick them up, and it would all start over again.  By the time I met this monstrous couple, they were actively trying to kill each other, and their lack of success was a deep disappointment to many, including me.  All of this is absolutely true, and it's not even the worst.  I wrote a very long story called Grace about them which I've never been able to find a market for.  Probably just too damned dark.  Some things no one wants to hear...

Rift by Liza Cody (1988).  

This is actually the first coming-of-age book of a young woman I ever read and it doesn't involve love and/or romance.  (Huzzah!  Passed the Bechdel test!)  Fay is working on a film shoot in Kenya and decides to drive to / through Ethiopia, and agrees to deliver a letter across the border from a writer to his estranged lover, Natasha Beyer. She ends up in a nightmare, from the famine, epidemics, armed insurrections, crime(a), and intrigues that take her far too long to catch on to.  But Fay finds out that she's willing to do anything to survive, absolutely anything, and she does it.  And then she "gets" to live with it.

"It's based on a trip I made myself at a time of famine and revolution. All the places are real, as are a lot of the characters and some of the events. I should not have been there, because to witness events like those and yet be able to do nothing to help made me part of the problem. I thought about it for over 10 years before I dared write about it. But even after 10 years, the trip was, in memory, still so catastrophic that I needed to face it and try to make sense of the experience.

I don't actually believe that writing a novel was the appropriate response, but it's the only skill I can use to remind people about other, godforsaken parts of the world where ordinary folk, just like you and me, endure or die in unbelievable suffering." - Liza Cody, July 2008  (Link - Robert Davis' comment)

My note:  To me one of the hallmarks of adulthood is to recognize and admit that you have done something wrong and irreparable:  and then learn to live with it, without inflicting the pain and/or self-pity on others, without falling into the too-handy illusion that it really wasn't that bad, and/or diving into any of the many substances or distractions provided by our world to make you even worse...  Fay manages that hat trick.  That's a reason to read it right there.  

Nemesis by Agatha Christie (1971)

This is my personal favorite of the Christie canon, and I feel the most literary of her works.  There is far more style and mood in the writing than Christie usually provided.  

“It was a neglected garden, a garden on which little money has been spent possibly for some years, and on which very little work has been done. The house, too, had been neglected. It was well-proportioned, the furniture in it had been good furniture once, but had little in late years of polishing or attention. It was not a house, she thought, that had been, at any rate of late years, loved in any way.”  (Which sounds to me almost like Shirley Jackson in my favorite of hers, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.)

The message from the dead.  A quest with justice in view.  An unspoken crime.  An unknown victim.  An unknown murderer.  The garden tours.  Three strange sisters.  Two unknown women.  Two victims.  

BTW, there are some modern essays on Nemesis about the lesbian angle, but I disagree with their negative tone. Christie did write about gay people in a positive way: in A Murder is Announced Miss Hinchcliffe and Amy Murgatroyd are a couple and no one thinks twice about it.*  Christie actually wrote quite a bit about the dangers of obsessive / possessive love, and what terrible things a person can and will do in order to keep someone... forever. Even if that doesn't mean alive.  I see Nemesis as Christie's meditative masterpiece on that danger.  I've often wondered how the ancient Egyptians managed to live with all those mummies, when what they really wanted was their loved ones back.  But then again, perhaps mummification wasn't so much about eternal life as eternal possession...  

*There's a similar couple in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire Chronicles, only neither gets murdered.  

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Won the Pulitzer Prize 1988

Just read it.  Just read it.  Just read it.  

The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary (1956)

Winner of the Prix Goncourt

Probably the first novel truly about environmentalism, set in Chad in the 1950s. But even more it's about the search for dignity and freedom in a world that regularly vomits up war, cruelty, concentration camps, destruction of humans, the natural world, etc., and justification for all of it.  The hero Morel is a French WW2 concentration camp survivor, whom everyone talks about (and mostly get wrong) but doesn't actually show up in person until late in the novel.  

“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson he was not prepared to forget.”

But this is the quote that haunts me the most:

Morel, talking about a stray dog he'd picked up in Berlin which vanished one day.  "He wandered all over looking for her, qeustioning people, but it was not a time when people were interested in lost dogs.  Finally, someone advised him to go to the pound.  He went.  The man led him in.  It was a place about 50 yards by 10, surrounded with barbed wire.  Inside it were about a hundred dogs, mostly mongrels, the kind one saw on every road of Europe or Asia, animals with no pedigree...  They gazed at him intensely, hopefully, all except the most discouraged ones, who seemed to know their fate and who did not even raise their heads to look at you.  But the others - they had to be seen to be believed, the ones who still hoped to be rescued, and who pricked up their ears and looked at you as if they knew how you felt..."  (p. 212)*

And this one seems very timely:

"That someone may simply be fed up with them and their ways and may want to look for another company, that just cannot enter their heads.  They can't believe it.  There must be a trick about it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand.  They're so used to sniffing their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different, and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them."  (P. 264-265, and always timely)

NOTE:  Romain Gary is the only person to have ever won the Prix Goncourt twice, first for Les Racines du Ciel (Roots of Heaven) and in 1975 for La Vie Devant Soi (The Life Before Us).  Madame Rosa, the film version of La Vie Devant Soi starring Simone Signoret, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1978.  I recommend reading him.  

*The first time I read that paragraph, I instantly thought of a scene in Fellini's Satyricon, when Encolpius and Ascyltus wander into an abandoned villa and spend the night with an African slave girl who was left behind, abandoned.  She sings, but she doesn't talk.  When they leave, she doesn't run after them.  There's something missing in her:  hope. Which is what happens, over time, to the homeless, the abandoned, the stateless, the orphans.  

Which is why we long for stories where (most) villains get their comeuppance, (most) victims get their revenge, and there is always a new beginning and a sure place for the lost and abandoned. Today there's too damned many Successions, Billions, House of Cards,etc. where all that happens to rich villains is that they die of old age in a cushy bed. We want a lot more than that. 

The great masters were the Victorians, both in England and in France.  

Dickens, except that he would keep killing off someone young and helpless like Little Nell, or abandoned and crippled like Smike, etc., to ram home how bad the baddies were.  

Robert Louis Stevenson could get pretty damn dark, too, what with Jekyll and Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae - but oh, Kidnapped (I fell so hard for Alan Breck) and Treasure Island.  Loved them both.

Alexandre Dumas:  The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are my two favorites.  (I tried the later D'Artagnan stories, but... not that good.)  Anyway, we're having the time of our lives watching the new production of The Count of Monte Cristo on PBS.  Let's face facts, there's nothing like watching someone betrayed, abandoned, and almost destroyed rise from the ashes and work out complete revenge on all those who did them wrong.  

"All human wisdom is contained in these two words – Wait and Hope”

Speak Nothing but Good of the Dead

 

I don't like to write bad reviews.  They serve a purpose  but somebody else can do that work, thank you very much.  There is a reason that every week I review the best short story I read.  What would be the point of attacking a story which will probably be gone from memory in a month or two?

I bring this up because of a novel I read recently.  It is actually a good book and I will probably say some nice things about it at a later day.

But, boy, is the text a mess.  I am talking about the Olympic prize for typos.  

A friend had warned me in advance so I actually started counting them from the beginning.  I counted 114 errors in 296 pages.  That's a typo every 2.6 pages.  And I was being conservative.  For example, when two characters spoke in the same paragraph ("Hello," Larry said. "Hi," Barry said.") I didn't count it.  

But what kind of goofs were there? Well, there were the typical homonyms that Spellcheck can't catch (you/you're, vile/vial, etc.) Once or twice a character changed their name and then changed back.  But what really freaked me out was a brand new type of typo, one that was clearly connected to a glitch in some automated system.  Look at the box to see an example I made up.

See what happened?  What I assume was an editing program occasionally and randomly decided that a capitalized word in the middle of a sentence indicated a new paragraph.  Rather disturbing.

Now, I am happy to say that the author of the novel got the rights back and has found  a different  publisher.  I trust the new edition will be a lot cleaner.  

I am not going to name the author or the book but I did intend to mention the publisher. I see no need to protect them.  But as it turns out they went out of business last year, so we go back to the title of this piece.

So let me wish you all typo-free reading and publication.

  

Time to Say Adios

Okay, I haven't known Marcia Muller for 47 years but perhaps a little closer to 37 years. I'm sorta on shaky ground but reasonably sure my first Bouchercon was 1989 when I met Ms Muller. By 1992, I knew her well enough to invite her to come do an author signing at Mysteries and More bookstore, which Elmer and I owned from 1990 to 1999. Or maybe it was 1995, when she and her husband Bill Pronzini came for a duo signing.

They drove to Austin from Houston where they had done an event earlier at Murder by the Book store. It was a Saturday and our event wasn't scheduled until Tuesday as our store was normally closed on Monday. The next day happened to be Easter Sunday when we understandly were closed. It all turned out fine as they joined us at Elmer's niece's house where we had family and a delicious Easter dinner.

The next day we took them to see our beloved Hill Country where the Texas bluebonnets and other wildflowers made it a fabulous weekend. Elmer and Bill bonded then which led to visits back and forth through the years. On one trip to CA, I was able to finagle a plane ride with Marcia and her flying instructor. Another time, a drive with Marcia along the coast, led to a visit to the "real week-end getaway belonging to Sharon McCone & Hy Ripinski."

I read EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES soon after it came out and decided then and there I'd be friends with Sharon McCone through all her adventures. I am totally thrilled she found true love and is happy with her life. Although it makes me a little sad to know CIRCLE IN THE WATER is the last Sharon McCone book, as a fan and a friend, I can totally understand. I will advise you readers and fans to get your copy on the 24th. However, I'm also sure you can pre-order now.

— Jan Grape

TIME TO SAY ADIOS
by Marcia Muller

Creating a long-running series –47 years– has been a pleasure. Also frustrating. Maddening. Crazy-making. All those story lines to remember. All those characters to make toe the line. All those real-life locations to check out for changes.

Story lines: many of them in my Sharon McCone series are intertwined, dating back to 1977.

Characters: they've moved residences, switched jobs, married, divorced, even– *shock!* –changed their hairstyles.

Real-life locations: throughout California and many other areas, they're radically different from those I started out with, particularly in San Francisco.

Which all adds up to why, in my current and last McCone novel (Circle in the Water, Grand Central Books, April 23) I've written an afterword, bringing the reader up to date on where the characters are now and the good things their lives will lead them toward in the future.

I emphasize good things. After all, for 47 years they've been good to me. Why shouldn't I be good to them?

And of course, the book is dedicated in part to my readers, who have made my long career possible. Thanks to them all!

Adios!

Synopsis and Poisons

No conversation about submissions to literary agents is complete without a discussion about writing a synopsis. There are many professional and calm articles about this topic but this article is neither for one very important reason: I’m married and have children.

The many excellent articles explain how to write a synopsis in simple terms. Summarize the novel’s plot (status quo, inciting incident, rising action, crisis and resolution) main subplots, characters and none of this should read like a dry summary. It should include characters’ emotions and reactions to what’s happening. All of this should be done in 500 - 800 words (preferably 500).

Most of these articles are written in a way that encourages writers to tackle this task with confidence. They explain how this is a doable task and would even help identify any plot holes. I appreciated all this help and encouragement.

So, armed with the criteria, I started writing a synopsis. I ended up with a synopsis of a couple thousand words that barely touched the surface of my over 80K word book. So, I needed to cut the word count and make it more thorough at the same time.

No problem, I thought. I can do this. So, working hard I got rid of about 1,000 words and still had too many words and now also had a very dry synopsis.

I went from being delighted with all the advice, to resenting the encouragement about a task that’s clearly impossible. Increasingly, my mood became foul and my language became fouler. This is where my marital status and family enters the story.

My husband, trying to be helpful, told me that I’m a good writer, he’s sure I can do this and would do a great job. He sounded like the encouraging articles. There are moments in a marriage where your partner says all the wrong things. This was that moment. Sometimes I can shrug it off, mostly because the children are very fond of my husband and would miss him if anything happened to him. However, determined to fulfil his role as my support, my husband went on. And on. When he stopped to catch his breath, before he launched into more encouraging statements, I asked him if he could please help. He was delighted to be asked. I requested that he find my book of poisons - I hadn’t seen it in years - while I get a shovel. He said he’d look later because he needed to take the dogs for a walk first.

I went back to work with no more encouraging interruptions.

The upshot is that my synopsis is now down to 500 words. It needs work but it’s mostly there. Better than that, writing it did help me identify a plot hole and helped me be much more focused on plot when editing my manuscript for the trillionth time. I do think writing a synopsis is actually useful.

At this point, you probably don’t care about the synopsis at all and are asking different questions. Did my husband ever locate the book of poisons? Is that really gardening I’m doing in the backyard? When was my husband last seen? How are the children?

I actually did buy a book for writers on poisons many years ago. I cheerfully showed it to my husband who was uncharacteristically quiet. Oddly, I must have misplaced it because I have not seen it since. I didn’t even get to read it. My husband has looked for it diligently and cannot find it.

My husband is walking the dogs right now. All the neighbours can see him. The children are fine. My garden remains woefully untended but I have some herbs, thanks for asking.

I highly recommend writing a synopsis. Don’t be fooled by the encouraging articles. I doubt I’m the only one who was frustrated with the task and baffled why I was the only one incapable of doing it. It’s not an easy task. It’s very hard. It’s also worth it if you get someone wise to hide the book of poisons before you begin. Think about the children.

Some Favorite Novels

Since posting a list of some of my favorite short stories back on June 2nd, my mind clicked to some of my favorite novels. Many of these books inspired me to write fiction. These are favorite novels, not a best novel list.

In no special order:

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter

Nineteen Eighty-four by George Orwell

Goodbye Mickey Mouse by Len Deighton

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Lucia, Lucia by Adriana Trigiani

The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani

The Frozen Hours by Jeff Shaara

Pronto by Elmore Leonard

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Fin Gall by James L. Nelson

New York by Edward Rutherfurd

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson

River Girl by Charles Williams

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Black Cross by Greg Iles

A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin

White Fang by Jack London

The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain

Night and the City by Cornell Woolrich

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Standing in the Rainbow by Fannie Flagg

The Maddest Idea by James L. Nelson

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Bullet for Cinderella by John D. MacDonald

Kazan by James Oliver Curwood

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Heydrich Deception by Daniel Savage Gray

Ramage by Dudley Pope

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico (novella)

Tourist Season by Carl Hiassen

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

The Killing Circle by Chris Wiltz

Fortune's Fugitive by Linda Crockett Gray

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

The Wolves of Memory by George Alec Effinger

When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

The Bolitho Novels of Alexander Kent

The Ramage Novels of Dudley Pope

Non-Fiction Novels:

In Cold Blood by Trume Capote

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Trilogies:

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

    Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation 

The Century Trilogy by Ken Follett

     Fall of Giants, Winter of the World, Edge of Eternity

I have to stop or I'll go on and on.

That's all for now –

www.oneildenoux.com 

The Last 300 words: A Query Letter

I wrote a 80,000 word book that got shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for unpublished novels and then, decided it needed work so, I did what any sane person would do and wrote a whole new 80,000 word book. 

I’ve done my final edits and my editor will do her grim reaper work on it and then it’ll be done. 


Writing the book is the best part - it’s full of long mornings getting up before the sun and quietly writing. Even when I’m not writing and, perhaps sitting for lunch with my family, a part of the book comes up that I need to add to or edit, I replay it in a few different ways and often slip away to write it. Sometimes things are maligned by saying they’re child’s play but writing is child’s play in all the best ways - it is the total immersion into a world of your creation that’s so real that the real world can sometime pale in comparison.

Now I’ve hit the next step: the query letter.

The purpose of query letter is to seduce an agent into reading your book. An agent can’t read every book sent to them so a short letter is how they choose what to invest time into and what to reject. However, the whole process of writing a query letter has my heart racing, my mouth dry and in this state I couldn’t seduce my own husband let alone a complete stranger. But sure, let’s be seductive.

Did I explain that there are sections? Yes, sections. In 300 words.

I can barely say hello to an old friend in less that 300 words and that’s with no sections. 

First, there is a warm greeting to the agent and an explanation of why you want to work with them. For the agents I want to work with, I would need the whole 300 words to explain why they’re amazing, it would be an honour to work with them and why a future of having tea and chatting about books is both of us living our best lives.

Ok, maybe just me living my best life. 

Then I need a hook to get them interested in my book. A hook is a sentence or two to make them want - nay need - to dive into my book even if it means neglecting their children, pets or dinner in the process. This is the ultimate seduction and I’m not sure I’m up for that.

Can I beg off with a headache? 

Then I need to summarize my book. Summarizing a 80,000 word novel would take me (checks notes) 80,000 words.

That’s why I wrote the darn thing in the first place. 

Then there’s a little bit about me. I am down with that part and can do it in a few words. It’s the rest of it that’s driving me around the bend.

I have always loved reading. I can’t remember even a day in my life where I wasn’t immersed in a book and, whenever I finish all the books by an author I love its almost as bad as a death in the family. These constant companions of mine, writers, have always been my heroes who create worlds from nothing but ink. I have a new found respect for authors because they also they managed to wrangle this dreadful beast called a query letter. It is no small feat and may well be a bigger feat than writing their books in the first place.

This leads me to my next problem: should I write the query letter or just write another book instead? As an escape from the anxiety of the query letter, I’ve already mapped out another book and it’ll take less time and be less stressful than writing a query.

A summary of my writing experience is this: the first 80,000 words are a delight to write but the last 300 words are hell.

Character References

The Netflix miniseries Queen’s Gambit led me to check out the novel from my local library. I was charmed. Walter Tevis chronicles the professional life of chess prodigy Beth Harmon, an orphan who rises above her expectations.

Her journey reminds me of the vicissitudes of Bobby Fischer, America’s erratic genius. When Fischer faced off against his friend and relentless Russian competitor Boris Spassky in Reykjavík, for the first time the US saw Fischer and Spassky’s battle televised move for move. Those of us with an interest in chess enjoyed the showdown.

When Queen’s Gambit appeared on Netflix, those days came back to me. I was immediately captivated. I’m going to preach heresy– I liked the series slightly better than the novel.

Film has advantages over words on a page and one here was the portrayal of chess on the ceiling. (You have to see it to get what I mean.) Beyond that, the miniseries offered a few subtle enhancements. For example, Beth learns Russian and happens to overhear an opinion about her… a critical opinion that gives her a chance to assess the destructive path she’s taking.

Top chess players often suffer a touch of madness, Fischer among them. The great Paul Morphy committed suicide. Few women play. It might be sexism or women may be too smart to pursue chess. The actress, Anya Taylor-Joy, perfectly portrays that touch of something not-quite-right and does it in an endearing way.

In both book and on screen, the players (her competitors), her mentors, and especially her step-mother are well drawn. Unfortunately, the novel’s sketch of her primary Soviet opponent reminds one of a boar-like Leonid Brezhnev. The movie version opted for a sophisticated, elegantly dressed family man, which carries much better.

The series outlines that male habit of being cautious of interlopers until they prove themselves. Beth’s biggest fans become those she defeats. She earns their respect, unstinting admiration and, in one case even love.

The ending of the miniseries is well done, a fitting ending to a poignant story.

But…

In both book and film, I level a criticism about a small but important lost opportunity. The story opens with Beth’s mother crashing her car into a steel bridge. Later, her childhood friend Jolene asks, “What’s the last thing your mother said to you?”

Beth answers, “Close your eyes.”

Absolutely chilling, or it would have been except both the book and the film felt they had to add background, diluting that simple answer down to nothing. Therein, I thought, lay a lesson.

Oh, the cover, Queen’s Gambit… sheer genius.

The Movie was Better

It is a universal truth that a novel is always better than any movie made of it.  Except when it isn't.  These are rare.  There is an endless list of bad movies made of excellent books, from every freaking version of Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and other classics.  I would include The Great Gatsby, but I liked the original - I thought Redford was as opaque as Gatsby should be, Bruce Dern sufficiently rough, etc. - the only problem, as always, was Daisy.  It's my belief that the only way to make a "perfect" Gatsby would be to pull a Bunuel and have two different actresses play Daisy:  one actress for every time we see Daisy through Gatsby's eyes (romantic, beautiful, etc.) and another actress for the real, shallow Daisy everyone else knows. 

But there are a few movies that are equal to if not better than their source material.  My list:

• The African Queen - novel by E. M. Forster, movie directed by John Huston and starring, of course, Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.  
• Speaking of Bogart, there's Casablanca - has anybody ever actually read the play, Everybody Comes to Rick's?  
• The Third Man - Graham Greene wrote the novella at the same time he wrote the screenplay, but just keep watching the movie, okay? 
• Lonesome Dove - I infinitely prefer the miniseries, with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, to the book.  But, to tell you a deep dark secret, I think a lot of Larry McMurtry's books make better movies than the books themselves.  Including The Last Picture Show.
• In an opinion that could get me banned from Australia, I think the miniseries Cloudstreet is better than the book.  
• Picnic at Hanging Rock.  Trust me.  
• Miss Marple, as played by Joan Hickson, in Nemesis is fantastic, and the script as a whole is as close to a perfect transmutation from the page as I've ever seen.  
• Any movie version of Ivanhoe.
• 2001:  A Space Odyssey - pretty good sci-fi novel, iconic movie.

So, what are some of your choices?

BTW:  I would have done more of these, but my husband had a medical emergency and I've spent the last 3 days at the hospital with him.  He's back home now, for good hopefully, so… sort of back to normal.