No Exit

Settings play a key role in mysteries. Where do your mysteries tend to be set and why?

- from Susan

My stories are usually set in places I like, places I know well enough that I can let my eyes go out of focus sitting in front of my computer and step into the scene with all five senses. In some cases, the specific scene I’m writing is set in a place I’ve invented, but even then the fictional setting is likely an amalgam of real rooms, houses, streets, towns, parks, restaurants, offices, or cars I’ve been in.  Santa Fe, New England, Manhattan, San Francisco, Palo Alto – Dani O’Rourke tends to show up in a lot of the same places I do.

Because the setting can play such a large part in the reader’s emotional response to what’s on the page, I (like every other writer) pay attention to what surrounds the action and the dialogue.  It’s not rocket science. You can do it too.

Match the emotion in the space that can carry off the scene:

security	Room with closed door and smell of smoke
jumpiness	Room with smell of turkey, sound of chat
hopelessness	Room with a gun visible on mantelpiece
hopefulness	Room with a crackling fire in fireplace
despair	Room with framed “No Exit” sign
silliness	Room with no light and no heat

See? Of course, if it were that easy, we’d all be Macavity, Edgar, Agatha, etc. award-winners (as many of my Mind colleagues are). I hope you’re already fans of their exciting and decidedly moody writing. But my point, however simplistically expressed, is that setting matters as much as dialogue, action, plot.

In Mixed Up with Murder (February 2 – please look for it!) I chose a New England college town in late May. Flowers, green grass, high spirits, a sense of optimism. Perfect place for someone to drown on a golf course the day he’s supposed to tell Dani what’s bothering him about a big gift to the college. The serene overall setting provides contrast to the bad things that darken the campus mood. The golf course late at night, the empty classroom building after closing, the claustrophobic little room Dani finds herself in at one point in the narrative were all chosen to help create the sensations I want readers to feel as they get caught up in Dani’s scary encounters so far from home.

Mixed Up with Murder comes out early next year in print and e-book formats. Soon, I’ll share the cover, post some excerpts on my own website, give some copies away, and otherwise try to interest you in reading it. Until then, try sussing out what a writer is trying to convince you to feel in the next book you read, scene by scene. It’s an added layer of pleasure in a good read.

To Choose or Not to Choose

Do you prefer reading “classic” mysteries or contemporary mysteries? Why?

by Paul D. Marks

There’s something to be said for both. And sometimes it just depends on my mood. I probably go through periods where I read more classics than contemporary and then vice versa. But overall I probably read more new mysteries these days. And every once in a while I get a strong urge to reread something, particularly by Chandler or Ross MacDonald.


I once heard James Ellroy at a signing, I believe, say he didn’t read his contemporaries in the mystery-crime field because he wanted to do his own thing and not be influenced by them. And also because of the time involved in reading them.

I don’t feel that way. I think it’s good to see what’s going on, what the competition, so to speak, is doing. What they’re talking about, what the trends are, what’s in, etc. But that doesn’t mean I have to, or should, follow those trends or be influenced by them. I like to do my own thing and I guess if there was a report card for this the teacher would check off the box that says “not good at taking direction or following trends.” I’d hope so anyway. I spent many years “taking direction” when doing script rewrites. And one of the reasons I wanted to write fiction is to be my own boss. I understand there are editors and such, but still there’s more freedom here, if not total freedom.

Of my top 3 favorite mystery-crime novelists, two are classics, one is current. Number one with a bullet is Raymond Chandler (big surprise, huh?). Nobody can touch him. It’s like the Beatles for me. As many other rock bands that I love, they are in a class by themselves. Sui generis. I feel that way about Chandler.

My two other faves are Ross MacDonald and James Ellroy. Though I’m not as hot on Ellroy as I was at one time for a variety of reasons. And though he’s not a crime writer, I’m going to include John Fante here because I think his style and tone fit in well with Chandler and Hammett and Cain.

Other current faves are Carol O’Connell, Michael Connelly, Kem Nunn. And other classic faves are David Goodis, James M. Cain, Hammett and Dorothy B. Hughes.

When I read those classics I’m transported to a different time and it satisfies my sense of saudade for times and things that I may not even have experienced. I’ve always had a fantasy of being born in 1920, which would make me old enough for that “film noir” era after the war, as well as the war, of course. The war influenced film noir in many ways, but that’s for another post or maybe a book. And I do remember LA as a kid, when it was still the city that Chandler describes and pieces of which can still be found here and there. So, when I want to visit that time and place I either read books by these classic authors or watch movies set in that era, some filmed then, some filmed today, like LA Confidential.

So why limit yourself to one era or genre? There’s a whole world of great crime fiction out there. More than we’ll ever have time to get to, unfortunately.

***

And now for the usual BSP:

Vortex is on sale in e-form at all the usual places.

And there’s Goodreads Giveaway for Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea running for a few more days. Maybe win a FREE copy. https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/161413-coast-to-coast-murder-from-sea-to-shining-sea

The Joy of Dead Authors

by Catriona.

Classics or contemporaries?

There's a huge difference between the two when you're a crimewriter yourself. A contemporary novel might be by a friend, in which case you open it, pre-emptively squirming in case you don't like it and it shows on your face on next meeting.

Or maybe you've said you'll blurb it and then you're really stuck if you don't like it. What do you do? Lie? Say something ambiguous and lukewarm -"fans will be delighted ..."? Pretend some calamity befell you and prevented you from reading it at all? But then what if some calamity really did?

Me, earlier this year, when I had promised to read a book
and couldn't. Because of the Vicodin.

Really all I ever want to say when a pal writes a book I love is "Phew!"

But, even though the mystery community is a warm one, we don't all know each other. Sometimes you pick up a new crime novel by an author you've never heard of. And it's great. And so you go to see if there are any more. And there are twenty five and you want to die. While you're recovering, Stephen King, Harlan Coben, Lisa Scottoline and Ann Cleeves all publish a new one and they're great too and you wonder what the point of your own wretched scribbling is. To take your mind off your woes, you read an article about the rich seam of crimewriting in some faraway land, that's just about to be translated into English for the first time, and then a reliably wonderful series writer produces a standalone that blows your socks off coughKentKruegercough and you ask yourself why you even bother then woops! Another Stephen King. (And guess who my favourite contemporary non-crime fiction author is? Joyce Carol Oates. Big help.)

But with the classics, you know where you are. Dorothy L Sayers wrote twelve. Raymond Chandler wrote seven. Agatha Christie wrote well yes sixty six, but the thing is she won't write another sixty six while you're reading. It's just so much more restful to read books by authors at rest.

In conclusion, here is an entirely gratuitous picture of the new bookshelves my father has just made for my office (because Cathy started it yesterday). Note the extra capacity. It won't last long but it won't be Sayers, Christie or Chandler who wreck it.

Thanks, Dad.

Choosing a Good Book

Q: Do you prefer reading “classic” mysteries or contemporary mysteries?

As if it were that easy, eh?

Do you prefer chocolate ice cream with marshmallow sauce, or vanilla with hot fudge? Chicken or cookies? Van Gogh or Matisse? Paris or New York?

There are times when I crave the pure puzzle of a classic Agatha Christie story that hums along inexorably to what I know will be a tidy solution, written in brisk, confident language, breezily defining characters on the surface, leaving it to readers to decide whether or not to embellish them with their own imaginations.

But there are other times, scanning my bursting bookshelves and stacks and table tops, when I can’t work up even the slightest appetite for that part of the crime fiction genre, when I need something more filling, more demanding of me, possibly more shaded, definitely something more of my own times. 

I can become paralyzed by the choices, so much so that I retreat from my study, where all the crime fiction lives to the guest bedroom where another overstuffed bookcase is full of Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Irene Nemerovsky. I even get a sudden craving for poetry once in a while, which is healthy – reminds me that every word should count, whether I’m reading or writing.

Menu choices

Some favorites when I want a complicated dish: Sara Paretsky, Elmore Leonard, Stuart Neville, P.D. James, Michael Dibdin, Dennis Lehane, Denise Mina, Colin Cotterill, Lisa Brackmann, Martin Cruz Smith. Modern, edgy, compromised protagonists dealing with an often mean and unjust world in which there’s no guarantee the good guys will win.

For dessert, in addition to Christie: Rex Stout, Anne Perry, Arthur Conan Doyle, Juliet Blackwell, Camille Minichino, Magdelen Nabb, Susan Elia MacNeal. Not all cozies, and all more character-driven and psychologically interesting than Miss Marple or Hercules Poirot, but worlds in which order is, at least temporarily, restored and the protagonist and I can sleep easier at night.

I’m just scratching the surface of good reads I know are waiting for me. Just thinking about what’s waiting for me makes me hungry, and ticking them off in my head makes me as happy as if I were eating Christmas dinner! 

Sharks Are Jerks

Today I’m happy to have my friend S.W. Lauden fill in for me. Steve is a rising star in the noir fiction world. As he likes to say he’s a writer and drummer living in Los Angeles. His short fiction has been accepted for publication by Out of the Gutter, Criminal Element, Dark Corners, Dead Guns Magazine, Akashic Books, WeirdBook, Spelk Fiction, Shotgun Honey and Crimespree Magazine.

In his debut novel, Bad Citizen Corporation, Salem, an East Los Angeles police officer by day and a beach cities punk rock legend by night, is forced into action when his two worlds violently collide. Bad Citizen Corporation is available now from Rare Bird Books. Check out the cool trailer here http://badcitizencorporation.com/2015/10/28/bad-citizen-corporation-book-trailer/. And his novella, Crosswise, will be published by Down & Out Books in 2016.


"What motivates you most strongly to maintain your writing life, even -- or especially -- when the going gets tough?"

by S.W. Lauden


Writing my first novel was like doing surgery on myself while fighting off shark attacks. Lucky for you, the wounds are still fresh. So let’s do a little poking and prodding!

Why surgery? Because, as far as I know, nobody has ever written anything worth reading without digging deep inside of themselves with both hands. Doesn’t matter what genre. The best writing I’ve read seems to demand it.

Why a shark? Because they’re totally unpredictable killing machines and nature’s best stand in for self-doubt, self-criticism and self-sabotage. Sharks, at least for the purposes of this extended metaphor, are jerks.

Also, my new mystery, Bad Citizen Corporation, is about a punk rock cop who spends a lot of time surfing. So strap on your life vests, kids, the waters ahead are teeming with beach puns.

BCC may be the first novel I published, but it isn’t the first one I wrote. That honor goes to a sprawling, multi-decade tome about a time-travelling circus clown that accidentally invents rock and roll. I wrote it in 2001, had a few friends read it, and then promptly abandoned that project and fiction writing all together.

The surgery was a failure. The patient flat-lined. Sharks feasted on that bloated corpse for more than a decade.

Fast forward to 2011. I was swept up in the wave (!) of Nordic crime fiction that made Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo and Arnaldur Indridason household names—at least they were in my house. That’s when I saw it on the horizon, a sliver of an idea for a mystery novel of my own.

The concept for BCC started with the main character, Greg Salem, a punk rock cop who was caught between two worlds and trying to find his best friend’s killer. It was enough to get my wheels spinning.

I wanted to jump over the rail and immediately start swimming, but I couldn’t help scanning the water for fins. Sure enough, there they were, circling to remind me that I’d never be talented, dedicated or lucky enough to publish a novel.

You already know that I took the plunge anyway. I haven’t stopped writing since.

Not when the day job is kicking my ass, the kids are bouncing off the walls, inspiration eludes me or I get another rejection letter. Not even when I’ve convinced myself that everything I write is garbage. Again.

It can be hard work, but it isn’t anything I have to do. It’s something I want to do. Something I get to do. And I try really hard not to take that for granted. Some days are better than others.

So any time I feel like I’m going to end up swimming with the fishes, I remind myself that it could be a lot worse. I could give up on one of the things in my life that makes me the happiest.

That’s usually enough to clam me up. But when it isn’t, I pick up my scalpel and get ready for the sharks. They always arrive when the first drop of blood hits the water.

S.W. Lauden’s debut novel, Bad Citizen Corporation, is available now from Rare Bird Books. His novella, Crosswise, will be published by Down & Out Books in 2016.

***

Thanks for stopping by, Steve. Good luck with the book!

***

And, local SoCal people please check out the following MWA event at Barnes & Noble, Valencia, Saturday, November 7th at 2pm (click on picture to view a larger and more readable version):

For Shame!

What motivates me to write?

Well, sometimes it's enjoyable. The words flow, the ideas spark like a cut wire in a puddle, the problems are ground to powder under the pounding of the lap top keys. That accounts for maybe ten or fifteen days a year.

And sometimes the end's in sight. I gallop towards the last page, looking forward to printing it out and dancing around to suitable music (ELO's "Mr Blue Sky" is excellent) then lying on the couch watching Castle and eating Kettle Chip sarnies. Let's call that another three days.

And sometimes, just sometimes, it's early days and nothing's gone wrong yet: the words on the page haven't started to knock all the gloss off the idea and cloud the bloom of creativity. Two days if I'm lucky.

So for twenty days a year I no more need motivation to write than I do to drink coffee and take Buzzfeed quizzes. Knock off a hundred days for weekends. Ten for Christmas hols (being a deadbeat European, I milk Christmas until after twelfth night (5th Jan)) another fifteen for Left Coast, Malice and Bouchercon, ten for summer hols and we're down to . . . two hundred and ten writing days to find motivation for.

Call it a round two hundred. Sometimes motivation fails.

For those two hundred days, my motivational cocktail is made up of dread, shame and fear. The dread of having to get a real job, the shame that I would feel if I flaked out on my contracts when so many good writers are trying to get one, and the fear of ever meeting anyone ever ever again and having to tell them I'm no longer a writer. Yep, it's public humiliation all the way for me.

Chained to the Desk, or Not

"What motivates you most strongly to maintain your writing life, even - or especially - when the going gets tough?"

This is a hard question for me to answer honestly because I don’t actually know and wish I did. I love the idea that I have a “writing life,” but feel like a bit of a fake at times.

First, I’m not always motivated. I goof off, I play, I say yes to friends who want to have lunch and people who want me to volunteer, and to my own travel lust.

Second, I’m occasionally writing without a contract; that is, I hope a story I’m writing will please my agent, who will then shop it around in the hope some acquiring editor will fall in love with it. Last year, I wrote an entire 70,000-page manuscript with no one pushing me with deadlines. Exciting to be flying free, but scary, and tough as shoe leather at times.

Third, every segment of the long process from that Hey-I-Have-A-Brilliant-Idea to the final proof before printing has its hard moments. The first draft is, for me, the most fun. The first revise is even okay. The revise after that, the one that deals with what the editor wants – the need to answer pesky questions about plot intricacies or character behavior – tough, tough.

I write because it’s damn near the only thing I know how to do. So, bottom line is this: I’m motivated because if I’m not writing, or sweating bullets editing for the fourth time, what else am I going to do? Bowling is out; I learned that in high school. The ladies who lunch are lovely, but I’m antsy after the salad and find that I’m eavesdropping on other conversations looking for a tasty bit of dialogue to steal.

So, ultimately, what motivates me is the idea that this time I may get closer to the vision I had in my head when I started the book, that I may get better at this writing thing, that people will read my story and love it.

New Faces, New Crimes, New Challenges, Bouchercon 2015

by Paul D. Marks

Before I get to the question at hand, I’d like to congratulate Art Taylor and Catriona McPherson on their award wins! So...congratulations! Well done—though I prefer mine medium rarified.
 
Ah, thoughts on the recently deceased Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, NC.

To go or not to go—to this or that convention—that is the question. We decided to go, hoping for the best all the way. Of course you never know what kind of riff raff you’ll run into on an airplane. We ran into this guy—Kevin Burton Smith of Thrilling Detective (see pic below)—who had the seat right behind me on one leg of our trip, which gave him ample opportunity to kick my seat and heckle me.

And we had a great time at the convention. Seeing old friends, making new ones. We saw people from this blog: Alan Orloff and his wife, Catriona, Susan. Art and his wife, Tara. Wish I could have met up with Meredith, but next time! And we hooked up with Amy’s parents and one of her sisters, who drove up from Georgia for dinner, the night before B’con started.

The Shamus banquet was a hoot, as always. And I recorded my story “Howling at the Moon” for Ellery Queen’s podcast. I ain’t no actor, so hopefully I did okay. I would have preferred James Earl Jones do the reading and he wanted to, but unfortunately he had a previous commitment.

Every convention has its challenges. My biggest challenge this time around was trying to figure out what my panel was all about. The panel was called “New Faces, New Crimes, New Challenges.” That could be about anything.

Of course, everyone wants to get on a panel, myself included. And I was excited to get on two panels this time. Unfortunately, both were skedded for exactly the same moment in time. And I really wanted to do some Star Trek thingy—excuse my lack of expertise in TrekTalk but I don’t know what the term would be—where I could split myself in two and do both panels, but alas there’s only so much of me to go around—so I was deleted from one panel, just backspaced out and asked to moderate the other. I got volunteered.

Now if you’re on a panel called “The Changing Face of Publishing for Writers and Readers” or “The Resurgence of the Traditional Mystery” or “Just the Facts: The Police Procedural,” it seems to me you’d have a pretty good idea what the subject is that you’re going to be talking about. But “New Faces, New Crimes, New Challenges” could be just about anything. So, I asked my panelists what they thought it meant and they couldn’t figure it out either. Anxiety grew exponentially: what will we talk about? Especially as not all of the panelists were really what I would consider new faces, including me.

So after much deliberation and consulting a higher authority—Yogi Berra—who said: “If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else,” so we wound up someplace else and I decided we should talk about new faces and semi-new faces, new challenges and new crimes and how one gets away with those in the age of CSI and DNA. But from all reports I heard it went pretty well. And I was happy that we got about 30 people there since Megan Abbott and others were paneling at the same time.

So I was very happy that the panel went well. And really everything at the convention and the whole trip went well. We had no major glitches, which is always nice. We stayed on a couple of days after Bouchercon ended to explore Raleigh. You can see more about that on my Sleuthsayers post at www.Sleuthsayers.org on Tuesday, October 20th.

We got home just a couple nights ago and, as my mom used to say, “It’s good to go and good to come home.” And when we pulled in our driveway the other night and saw our house and anticipated seeing our animals that’s exactly how I felt: There’s no place like home.

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