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Saturday, December 31, 2011
Monkey Number 101
Friday, December 30, 2011
The Sock Fairy
But over the years, I’ve outwitted the Sock Fairy. I’ve found there are some ideas that simply bubble back to consciousness. Sometimes it’s the image of a face, an emotion, a song, a bit of poetry. When the idea or image persists I have little choice but to write about it.
One of the questions that comes up repeatedly in classes or courses I teach is “will an editor or an agent steal my idea?” This is highly unlikely although it has been known to happen. The merit of a written work lies in its unique execution.
There is an creepy aspect to creation, however. If you have a great idea, or even a pretty good idea, the chances are sky high that it’s occurring to someone else at the same time.
This was brought home to me very vividly at a recent writer’s conference. I had helped a student develop a cross-genre vampire mystery (Names and genre changed to protect the innocent). An agent with whom I’m well acquainted read his manuscript, had him revise it, and then didn’t accept it. At the conference I overheard her mention receiving a book from one of her authors. It sounded like my student’s and she was marketing it. Dismayed, I asked her about it. Of course it looked like she might have swiped this idea and turned it over to a more skillful author.
I took great care to phrase my question just right. (No way this would not sound stupid, but never mind. I did it anyway.) I overheard you talking to _____, “ I began bravely. “Is there any chance you accepted ________manuscript after all?” “No” she explained easily, “One of my author’s submitted a book that was based on the same idea and I sent it to ______. But the house didn’t take it.” She shrugged. I suspect the manuscript from her established author was better written than my student’s anyway.
Later at this same conference, at the editor’s panel, we learned there was a WHOLE NEW GENRE being developed around this theme. Everyone in the whole known universe was thinking of this idea at about the same time. Naturally, I contacted my student at once and told him to submit the manuscript to this particular editor. Without an agent, it’s safe to assume the manuscript hit the slush pile and I don’t believe he’s had any luck so far. But who knows? He might get lucky.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
A look back at 2011
As for 2011, the best I can say is: we’re still here. The publishing industry hasn’t imploded, e-books are selling better than ever, paper books haven’t disappeared (I got three for Christmas!) and reading seems to be just as popular as it’s always been. We just still don’t know where this is all going.
Thanks to everyone who has read and commented on our posts here. Without you all, we’d be shouting into the wind. I hope we continue to interest and amuse you over the course of 2012. Happy New Year to all of you!
Monday, December 26, 2011
Christmas Story
But one of the highlights for me will be, I know, listening to the beautiful words of the Anglican Service of Light with my wide-eyed grandchildren, and hearing again 'the tale of the loving purposes of God.'
And what a tale it is! It's so familiar to me that I've only now, blogging about writing, looked at the ways it fulfils the demands of narrative.
It has us hooked from the start with the dramatic visit of a messenger with news which turns the life of an ordinary girl upside down; we simply have to know what happens next. Will her fiancé, dismayed at the news that the woman he loves is to bear a child that isn't his, denounce her to public shame, let her creep away quietly - or accept her story as truth? At the end of the anxious journey they are forced to take to an overcrowded city, with her heavily pregnant, will they find somewhere – anywhere – for the birth? The account of stars and angelic choirs and worshipping shepherds and oriental kings sweeps us along, and all the while, there is the villainous king in the background, plotting destruction. There is the apparent happy ending as the little family escape, but the story ends with the massacre of the other infants - a foreshadowing of the darkness that will gather as the story unfolds. It's classic, and it's brilliant.
Stories have been the way we have conveyed the profound truths about human life since the very beginning, the way we share our insights and our beliefs. Whatever story has been yours over these last few days, I hope it has been a joyous and fulfilling time, and that the year ahead is full of good things.
See you in 2012!
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Claire's Mother, by Donald Koozer

Since this is Christmas, Dear Readers, allow me to give you the gift of a story. My guest author today is part of the family, my husband Donald Koozer. His short story Claire's Mother first appeared in a literary magazine called Bellowing Ark back in 2009.

Friday, December 23, 2011
Holiday Books (Reading and Writing)
So the holidays are here, and I have a confession. One of the things I love best about the holiday season is that I have the time to curl up in a comfortable chair with a cup of tea or hot chocolate and read a book. This year – after catching The Thin Man (Christmas in NYC) on Turner Classic Movies – I’ve decided to go seasonal in my choice of what to read.
Below is one of the sites that I found with a list of holiday mysteries.
http://www.wppl.org/resources/RecReading/Mysteries/Holiday.html#Christmas
Looking at the holidays on this list reminded me that my second mystery, A Dead Man’s Honor, began on Halloween. A holiday is an especially useful time to have a murder mystery take place because what happens on holidays: people gather for events/celebrations and they eat, drink, and sometimes makes fools of themselves. At these events, people are sometimes in costumes. People come and go. They also duck into rooms or alcoves or step out onto terraces for private conversations that may be seen or overhear.
There are also wonderful seasonal ways of doing in one’s victim. For example:
Christmas – electrocuted why testing the lights on the tree.
New Year’s – cyanide in that glass of champagne at midnight
Valentine’s Day – an exploding box of chocolates
April Fool’s Day – an elaborate practical joke that turns lethal
Easter -- a killer in a bunny costume with more than eggs in his basket
Memorial Day – a picnic at the lake and a nasty cramp while swimming
Well, you get the idea. I didn’t even mention Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and Administrative Professionals Day.
I love holidays. A great time to catch up on one’s reading. And an even better time for someone to breathe his or her last as the celebration is underway.
Happy Holidays, Everyone! Go easy on the eggnog.
A Brief Report from Christmas Week with Harry Potter
John here, with more photos than words this week. We’re at Harry Potter World, Universal Studios, for the week. Left Connecticut when it was 13 degrees, and Orlando has been right around 80 since we arrived.
I am embarrassed to admit before all of Type and God himself that I am the only living human who has not read the Potter books. Of course, this makes me a total disgrace to Audrey, my 10-year-old, and Delaney, my 13-year-old. (“And you call yourself an English teacher?”) But I am making up for this sad fact by paying for the butterbeer and the magic wands this week.
A couple things I have learned so far: I enjoy my 3-year-old Keeley’s Dr. Seuss rides more than Delaney's Dragon Challenge roller coaster; it is possible to pay $17 for three ice-cream cones (Thank you, J.K. Rowling); and the Kindle app is much easier to use than the iBooks app.
Up at 4 a.m. to write, then logging more miles at the parks.
Merry Christmas to all.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Searching for the Forest

Barbara here. Reading the last few posts on this blog, I’m struck by how varied and thoughtful they are. Eight authors share this blog, each with our own voice and interests, covering the spectrum from young to old, cozy to dark and from the US, Canada and the UK. Vicki Delany made the inaugural post on July 26, 2006, and in the past five and a half years, 1406 blogs have been posted. Some have been funny, some poignant, others profound. We all share a passion for crime fiction, but beyond that our individual blog posts are full of variety and surprises. Our unifying hope is that our blog will reach out and touch people.
Coming up with a good blog every week or two is a challenge; it steals time that would otherwise go to creative writing, research or other promotional pursuits. Some of us, like myself, belong to two blogs, making the challenge even more difficult. Sometimes it feels daunting. There are literally thousands of blogs out in the cyber marketplace. Is anyone reading this one beyond a handful of die-hard friends? Should we be devoting those precious hours to our website, our Goodreads profile, or our Facebook page instead.
This past week saw the demise of one of the longest-running crime-writers’ blogs, The Lipstick Chronicles. The authors felt that the blog was a dying medium, that other social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter had superceded it as the point of contact between authors and readers and as a means of spreading ideas. People no longer have the time nor the patience to read blogs, and prefer the shorter, more interactive format of FB and Twitter.
If this is so, then there will be a cost, intellectually. In a world increasingly informed by shallow slogans and catchy sound bites, deeper understanding and analysis fall by the wayside. No idea can be adequately explored in 140 characters, nor in the short exchanges of a Facebook update. Not all blogs are profound, but at their best, blogs allow the writer to develop an idea, share an observation, or provide information at a level that is more than skin deep. They allow the reader to reflect, to focus and to delve into an experience beyond a fleeting moment. If we value the continuation of an informed and thoughtful society, surely that’s important.
But do we?
A blog is usually 400 – 800 words. A mere five minutes. But is that too long in today’s world? Too long for today’s distracted, impatient, restless reader? Is the blog, like the essay, a dying medium in this cyber world that no longer looks for the forest in the trees?
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
My last word on covers...until the next time

One thing that came up several times was my tip for looking at a colour cover in black and white (or more correctly “grayscale”). The reason for doing this is that you can readily identify design problems about the cover when the colour information has been removed.
First, to remove colour, you can do one of two things. If you have a photo manipulating program, all you do is convert the cover image into grayscale. If you’re on a Mac, you can use the editing function in iPhoto and just reduce the “saturation” of your photo to 0. I’m sure there are similar programs that come with Windows computers. This isn’t the place to talk about all the details of how to do this stuff. Most programs have good directions or you can just look up on the Internet how to do this. The final thing is to just print out your cover on a B&W printer.
Now, take a look at your grayscale cover. Does all the type stand out and is it easily readable? If it isn’t, the colour values are too close. This will show up immediately when a colour cover is changed to grayscale. By colour value I am referring to the lightness or darkness of a colour and the colours surrounding it. For instance, if the colour value of red type is close to the colour value of the brown background it's printed on, the red type will “disappear” and be very tough to read. That’s not a good thing if we’re talking about the title of your book, is it? I’ll be the first to say that a relatively competent designer won’t make this mistake, but it does happen. (I've done it a few times!) You can spot this potentially disastrous problem by doing the simple grayscale test. Colour value problems will leap out at you.
If you want to read up more on colour value and better understand colour spaces on various platforms, I can suggest reading this article: usask.ca/education/coursework/skaalid/theory/cgdt/color.htm.
Another question I got was that the cover looked great when it was sent over from the publisher as a JPEG or TIFF, but when the author finally got the finished book in their hands, the cover was much darker and harder to read. There are a few reasons that this has happened.
The first thing to understand is that computer monitors are transmissive light sources. You’re looking at something that is lit from behind. It will always appear brighter. Also, unless you’re a designer, your monitor has probably never been calibrated, so it won’t show things colours really accurately or at the correct brightness.
Second, printed matter is reflective. The ink is put onto paper, and when you look at it, the light has gone through the ink, hit the paper and is bounced back through the ink again to your eyes. It will always look darker than seeing the image on a computer monitor. The whiteness of the paper used in printing will have an effect. Also the finish on the paper, the overall quality of the paper and how heavily the press put the ink on the paper, all of these will affect how you perceive the colour and brightness.
Confused yet? More information than you ever thought you’d need? Well, if you want to be able to evaluate your cover’s design, you need to know a bit about how printing and design works. What can you do about problems? Tell your contact at the publisher. Speak to the designer, if possible. Sometimes a junior designer has been put on your job, and while they may have some terrific design ideas, they may not know enough about printing. That’s something that can be woefully lacking in some graphic design programs at colleges, even good ones. After time passes, we designers learn from our mistakes and get a feel for how that terrific design on our computer monitor will look when the ink hits the paper. The information outlined above will help you understand the process.
Or should. I hope what I’ve written here does. Keep those questions coming. I’m happy to answer them on here or on a private email.
To the Type M family and our readers, I’d like to wish you all a terrific holiday season and the very best in 2012!
PS I’ve included the cover to my forthcoming novel with Dundurn Press as an illustration of one that does everything right. It’s a terrific design in every way, and I think it really sells the “sizzle” of the story. And no, this is one cover I didn’t design – but I couldn’t be happier with it. I wish I could tell you the designer’s name, but alas I don’t remember it at the moment.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Unhitched
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Repo Man & The Outlaw
Since writing doesn't earn me a living wage, I do bookkeeping a couple of days a week at Grumpy Old Men's Auto Repair here in Tucson. Times are tough. I'm not the only one working multiple jobs to get by. One of our customers, a teacher, moonlights as a Repo Man. That means he surreptitiously repossesses vehicles from owners who haven't kept up with their payments. It's a risky job, not something you'd normally expect a high school teacher to do on the side. But, risk brings rewards. It pays well.
Repo Man is small time. He's got a little salvage yard where he stores what he picks up. He's licensed and bonded. And he got himself a very cool tow truck. It's a big Ford 250, equipped with a stealth boom that hides in the truck's bed until he needs it. When he finds one of the vehicles he's after, he can pull up in front or behind and activate the towing mechanism. It unfolds out of the bed like one of those convertible hardtops popping out of a trunk. The boom drops to just above ground level. It's then maneuvered under the target, lifts a pair of wheels, and get's out of the neighborhood fast. Some folks object, assuming they should be allowed an infinite number of months without payments. Bringing a gun to the argument is not unheard of. This is Arizona, remember. Our legislature made it legal for everyone here to carry concealed—no permit required. And there are lots of ways to buy the weapon of your choice without any record of the purchase.
Some people might call it perfect justice—or evidence of a divine sense of humor. Whatever, Repo Man had his tow truck stolen a few weeks ago. Ironic, isn't it, that someone with a complete understanding of slim jims and lock busting slide hammers should get hit by an outlaw with similar skills. Law enforcement, however, recovered the truck within a couple of weeks. Without the stealth towing system, though, which the thief sold on the theory that anything you don't pay for is all profit. Not enough, though, since the outlaw and the truck got caught at a local casino. The thief probably thought wagering the proceeds of that towing system wasn't a real gamble and could turn small profits into bigger ones.
Unfortunately, the truck came back a little the worse for wear. One of the door handles was broken for access, of course. And the ignition switch no longer required a key. A couple of fenders were also a bit crumpled. Nothing major, but the insurance company added up the costs of replacing the towing rig and fixing the truck and decided to declare it a total loss. Repo Man bought it back for salvage value. He thinks he can sell it at a profit. Big trucks are mighty popular along the border. Never know what or who you might need to haul around. Besides, he's found a newer truck and a used stealth tow rig he thinks he can pay for with the insurance money and by selling his former truck.
His story caught my attention because it's a lot like my Mad Dog & Englishman novels—a Murphy's Law kind of situation with a sweet sense of irony, some justice in the end, and unexpected twists. Repo Man's twists arrived a little after he got his truck back. They came in two letters from the City of Tucson—parking tickets. Red zone violations, and those aren't cheap here. He called Tucson's police department. After all, he has documentation that the truck was stolen at the time it got ticketed. Only it turns out the auto theft division can't fix parking tickets, not even for the obviously innocent. So he's going to have to waste time in court because our outlaw was willing to gamble on parking spaces as well as gaming tables. Repo Man is a little upset by that, to say nothing of the fact that the cops issuing the parking tickets couldn't be bothered to run his tags and identify his truck as a stolen vehicle. The truck might not have been damaged or the repo rig removed yet when the parking tickets were issued. And two opportunities to retrieve his property were wasted.
That's exactly the kind of plot twist I throw at my characters. Spend a day with the heroes of my Mad Dog & Englishman mysteries (less, actually, since all the books take place in under twenty-four hours) and you'll find that cosmic jokes are the rule, and things are never so bad that they can't get just a little worse.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Life in the Gaps
Friday, December 16, 2011
Ghost of Christmas Past
I have some old tree ornaments that are tarnished beyond redemption, and some old walnuts I painted gold and hung the first year Don and I were married. They were followed by other homemade concoctions. And the crown jewel of our lifetime of Christmas memories is Old Sparkly.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
More Ideas
You never know where inspiration will come from. And to keep me from wasting the little time I have each week for writing, I keep a file of quirky or interesting news briefs. Here’s one I found on truecrimereport.com Monday night. I won’t give you the whole article; the lead was enough to get me thinking. It’s something out of an Elmore Leonard story:
Cops discovered the off-duty Miami-Dade police officer passed out in his own patrol car as it idled in an intersection. According to his arrest report, Villa blamed his sluggish responses on a concussion he suffered at least 13 years ago while playing high school baseball.
I’ll leave it up to you to fill in the blanks regarding Officer Villa, but, as you can guess, the Miami-Dade Police Department wasn’t buying his story.
And how about this one on weirdnews.about.com:
Tinker Bell he ain't.
Police in Arkansas say 50-year-old Michael Wyatt has a secret identity: He's the "Toe Suck Fairy," and the cops say he has been harassing women and telling them how much he'd like to... well... suck their toes.
Two of three women who've had to deal with his alleged advances picked him out of a lineup -- and police say he's got a track record to back it up: A decade ago, Wyatt served time for a series of bizarre foot-related crimes, according to a report in the Huffington Post.
Enough said. If you’re looking for characters, this guy is memorable, if nothing else.
Reality is literally stranger than fiction. Looking for story ideas? You simply can’t make this stuff up.
Or can you?
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
The inside scoop on book covers

So drop over to Lynda Wiken’s mysterymavencdn.blogspot.com and join our little discussion, or leave comments here. It’s all good.
On last week’s announcement of our informal contest for bad book covers of 2011: I’ve received only two nominations, which is disappointing. Come on, people! There have got to be more than two bad covers foisted on an unsuspected reading public during the year. Let’s get some more nominations in!
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Monday, December 12, 2011
Ideas
It's the question authors are asked most regularly, often in a tone that suggests if only we would tell the audience, they could all go there and get some too.
I've tried various responses: the jokey, 'Well, there's this site on the internet. Standard ideas don't cost much, and even second-hand ones are quite affordable, but an original one? Prepare to mortgage the house.'
Then there's the earnest list of methods: wide reading, newspapers, TV news programmes, photographs, observation - eavesdropping, even. I can spend quite a long time on that reply.
If I'm being truthful, I just say, 'I don't know.' I wish I did, particularly at the moment when I'm starting to think about a new book.
The one I'm finishing feels like a pair of old slippers. I've worked it into the shape I want it to be and we're familiar friends now. I'm past the subdued panic stage when you're not at all sure it's going to work out, and now it's just a case of smoothing out rough patches and cutting adverbs I'm sure the book still has a couple of commas that would benefit from being full stops and a few 'which'es that ought to be 'that's. It's quite a soothing occupation, and I'm no more ready to let it go than I am to throw out my battered pink furry slippers, bought in an American Wall-Mart more years ago than I would care to mention.
But soon, I'm going to have to step out into unknown territory. I'm going to have to get to know new characters, see if they're going to speak to me, find out what's going to happen to them. And I need an idea that's going to drive me day after day for the next year or so. It's a scary business.
If anyone has that internet address, perhaps you could let me have it.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Confessions of a Serial Novelist
CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL NOVELIST: Or, How I Wrote Mystery Novels with Twelve Other Women and Lived to Tell the Tale
By
Marcia Talley
Fans of my Hannah Ives mysteries will be surprised to learn that I am also a serial novelist. I write novels with other women. And not just one woman either. TWELVE other women.
How could this happen to a good little girl from Cleveland, Ohio?
It’s like this. My agent called one day and mentioned that a publisher had paid Big Bucks for a serial novel about golf. Surely I could come up with something as interesting! How about a novel set in an exclusive health spa, I said? You could have a greedy owner, a star-struck daughter, a drunken senator, an aged rock star...I was on a roll. Naked Came the Phoenix was born.
I’d Kill for That was my second expedition into collaborative serial novel territory, and what an adventure it was! For the uninitiated, let me explain that the novel, like its predecessor, Naked Came the Phoenix, was written in round-robin style: one author writes the first chapter then passes it to the second who picks up the story where the first author left off, then passes it on to the third, and so on.
For me, coming up with the scenario – murder in an exclusive gated community – and creating a smorgasbord of fascinating characters for the others to play with was just the beginning. The fun really started when I turned it all over to my fellow authors, sat back and waited to see where my dream team would run with it, and they didn’t disappoint.
Under the talented pen of Gayle Lynds, the “greedy real estate developer” suggested in my proposal leapt to life “with a clash of cymbals and a drum roll” as Vanessa Smart Drysdale, a petite, chestnut-haired beauty in black leather slacks who possesses all the compassion of Cruella de Vil. Little did I know what Lisa Gardner had in store for poor, tormented Roman Gervase, and Julie Smith’s take on Sunday services at St. Francis of Assisi Interfaith Chapel had me chuckling for weeks. Other equally delightful chapters were penned by Rita Mae Brown, Linda Fairstein, Kay Hooper, Kathy Reichs (lending her customary forensic expertise, of course), Heather Graham, Jennifer Crusie, Tina Wainscott, Anne Perry, Katherine Neville and, ahem, me.
The authors seemed to enjoy the game, too. The rules were simple. Each chapter was to be written in the third person, with a definite solution in view, even thought we were well aware that subsequent authors might take – indeed were expected to take – the plot in divergent directions. Speaking of her chapter in Naked Came the Phoenix, which was set in a luxury health spa in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Nancy Pickard said, “It was dangerously liberating to know I didn’t personally have to deal with the consequences of whatever I put in my chapter.” Good thing, too, as she left our heroine struggling to extract the body of the spa owner from a mud bath.
Although writers were cautioned to avoid cliff-hanger endings that would require Houdini-like efforts on the part of the next author, the “real fun” comes, according to Laurie R. King who wrote the final chapter of Naked Came the Phoenix, “in seeing thirteen sweet-tempered lady crime writers stab each other thoughtfully in the back.” Judy Jance gleefully ended her chapter in that novel with Phyllis, the spa’s resident psychic, floating face down in a lake. Fortunately, however, someone in Faye Kellerman’s chapter knew CPR and revived Phyllis long enough for her to deliver a critical clue before lapsing into a coma.
As you might guess, my job as editor/contributor resembled a cross between tour guide and traffic cop as I assembled the team and worked out the intricacies of scheduling – each author had just a month to complete her chapter – and made sure, for example, that each author received packets of background information and copies of the chapters that preceded hers. Timing was critical. We met at conferences, spoke on the telephone and exchanged emails at a furious rate. As we raced to the finish line, Anne, Katherine and I kept the trans-Atlantic telephone lines hot as we brainstormed and worked out plot details – Anne Perry pointed out that the novel needed a love story, and she was right – so we put one in. And Val McDermid vowed she would not participate unless she could use the word “incarnadine,” a request I happily granted. Often we found ourselves revisiting an earlier chapter to plant a clue or clear up a discrepancy, and it fell to the amazing Katherine Neville – who volunteered for the job, I should point out – to tie up all the loose ends as our novel sprinted to its stunning conclusion.
It’s common for serial collaborations to benefit a worthy cause and I’d Kill for That is no exception. Like Naked Came the Phoenix before it, a percentage of the royalties is earmarked to support breast cancer research.
After I’d Kill for That, I had planned to hang up my serial novel pen, until Andrew Gulli, the editor of Strand Magazine, telephoned to twist my arm about a serial novel he was working on to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society—No Rest for the Dead – 26 bestselling authors! One terrific novel! according to Simon & Schuster who published it. Although I thought Andrew was out of his mind (and I told him so!) he decided to have all 26 authors write their chapters simultaneously. So, how did that work out? Listen to the authors as they comment at the novel’s New York City launch party in July.
There may be another serial novel in my future — never say never! — but in the meantime, A Quiet Death is recently out from Severn House in hardback and eBook, and I’m finishing Hannah’s eleventh adventure, The Last Refuge set entirely at historic William Paca House in Annapolis, Maryland!
Has Hannah Ives made the right decision joining the cast of Patriot House, 1774, a reality show recreating eighteen-century colonial life? There’s no electricity, no running water, and the cast are at the mercy of the show’s ‘Founding Father’. Even more worrying, Amy Cornell, Hannah’s lady’s maid on set, receives a text message from Drew, her Navy SEAL husband presumed dead after a botched mission ten months ago. Naturally, because I write mysteries (all by myself this time!) mayhem ensues. Look for The Last Refuge in the spring of 2012.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
I Wish I'd Said That
Friday, December 09, 2011
When Reality Intrudes
And then I felt – as before – a twinge of guilt because I write crime fiction in which murder and other bad things happen and people read my books for entertainment. I enjoy attending conferences where I and other writers talk with amusement about how we kill people in our books.
But I know that humans have been telling each other stories since we learned to communicate with language. Many of those stories have been about violence and death.
In fact, blaming crime writers for violence would be rather like blaming romance writers for women whose lives are on hold while they wait for the man of their dreams to appear.
We are drawn to certain types of stories and perhaps those stories reinforce myths and fantasies. But, at its best, fiction challenges us. Well-written romances are stories about relationships, about the personal growth that the characters must achieve in order to find happiness together. Good crime fiction not only examines conflicts within relationships that lead to violence but calls on the reader to think about the roots of greed and selfishness, and, yes, the nature of evil.
Still, when reality intrudes, I find myself stopping to ponder – to think about my choice to be a mystery writer. The truth is that even if I wrote romance novels, my books would always have a touch of mystery and probably a dead body or two. Perhaps – in the same way romances have happy endings – I want to present endings where justice triumphs even if the characters are left bruised by the events.
But I do wish for a world in which bad things happened only in the stories we tell.
Thursday, December 08, 2011
E.B. White and Giving Away E-books
What would E.B. White have said last night, were he in my living room as my wife hunkered down with her Kindle Fire (Merry Christmas!), my 10-year-old read the latest Rick Riordan book on her Nook, and my 13-year-old curled up with my iPad (probably not actually reading but rather shopping for a new family smartphone contract that will, she tells me repeatedly, only benefit yours truly)? The visual is a far cry from Thoreau’s Walden (“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…”).
The truth is, though, the essential facts of life have changed in the publishing industry and for book lovers. In May, Amazon reported that just four years after launching the Kindle (originally sold for $259; now starting at $79) the conglomerate online store’s e-book sales had surpassed print purchases. Moreover, according to a recent UK-based report, e-book sales worldwide are expected to triple by the year 2016 (generating nearly $10 billion a mere five years from now). Subsequently, the Kindle Fire seems to be the holiday-season rage. Amazon, as usual, isn't releasing specific Kindle sales figures, but Apple announced it's quarterly iPad sales are down as Kindle market-share figures rise.
My interest in e-books remains the same as any other writer: I’m trying to see where all of this leads. Yet I am also in a unique position, controlling all facets of my e-books. In college, I took too many English classes to even declare a minor, so I’m far from a marketing expert. But I’ve learned a couple things since making my five Jack Austin novels available in e-book formats. One is, the e-book reader is a sophisticated shopper. You can’t give these things away. I have gently and methodically raised the prices on my e-books (from free and $2.99 in June 2010, to $5.99 and $6.99 currently) and sales have improved with each price increase. Apparently, e-book readers figure if it’s free it can’t be good.
It’s an interesting online game. I don’t know where it’s headed or what E.B. White would think of it, but I know it’s far from virtual.
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
I have a Little Canadian List.

Two weeks ago on this blog I talked about the unique voices and unexpected delights that the midlist author brings to the world. Today, as promised, I want to talk about that most obscure of midlist authors, the Canadian. And since I write crime fiction, I will confine my remarks to Canadian crime writers. Canada has a rich tradition in many genres including literary fiction, which regularly finds itself on the short lists of international awards, and fantasy, of which my friend Violette Malan is a master.
I defy you to find a group of crime writers more talented, funny, scary, moving and powerful than Canadians. They can and do hold their own against the very best in the world. However, because the pool of readers and hence the promotional dollars available to publishers and authors of Canadian works is smaller, they can rarely compete for advertising space, promotional tours and bookstore placement with the bigger names from Britain and the US.
I have done hundreds of mall signings across Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes. Often people say they love mysteries and they name Patricia Cornwell, John Grisham, PD James, and the other superstars. When asked, however, they often can’t name a single Canadian. Yet about a hundred Canadian mystery novels are published every year. Some writers, like Peter Robinson and Phyllis Smallman, set their stories in Britain or the US, while others, like Dorothy McIntosh who wrote the antiquities thriller The Witch of Babylon, set their work overseas, which means they are marketed and promoted without overt reference to their Canadian connection. There are many reasons a writer might chooses to set his books somewhere other than Canada, including the lure of interesting stories and places, but a desire to make a living is also one of them.
But increasingly, Canadian crime writers are choosing to defy the financial odds and write for and about Canada. They want to tell our stories, deal with our issues and bring our settings to life. They want to write about Canadians. I’m one of them. I want to write about the world I know and the people who surround me. I don’t feel I could create unique, real people if I didn’t know them well. And no place is as vivid and textured to me as Ottawa. It turns out that despite the doomsayers – who wants to read about Canada? Good grief, who wants to read about Ottawa! – Canadians are delighted to read stories about their own city or country, about people they can almost see in the mirror. And non-Canadians thoroughly enjoy visiting a place and a culture different from their own.
So whether you’re Canadian, British, American or something else, consider buying Canadian for that mystery lover on your gift list. It’s impossible to name all the good books that came out this year, so I will take a quick trip across Canada to give you a sample of books and styles along the way. We’ll start on The Rock, with Thomas Rendell Curran’s latest Inspector Stride novel, Death of a Lesser Man, a classic whodunit set in post World War II Newfoundland. If you love hard-hitting legal thrillers with heart, hop across to Halifax with Indefensible by Pamela Callow. In Quebec, Louise Penny continues to bring the village of Three Pines to vivid life in her latest Inspector Gamache novel, A Trick of the Light.
Ontario, like British Columbia, has so many excellent writers in so many genres that it’s hard to pick one. The Guilty Plea by Toronto lawyer Robert Rotenberg? Tampered by Hamilton doctor Ross Pennie? How about Orchestrated Murder, by Rick Blechta, a compelling tale for the reluctant reader. Cross the prairies, where Saskatchewan legend Gail Bowen has just produced her third haunting tale for reluctant readers, The Shadow Killer. Heading farther west, Calgarian Garry Ryan brings heart and grit to his latest Detective Lane novel, Malabarista.
We finish up in British Columbia, another hotbed of crime. Vicki Delany has combined the cozy feel of the village mystery with the gritty realism of the police procedural to create the Constable Molly Smith series, set in the stunning Rocky mountains of BC. Among the Departed is the latest in this series.
This is but a small sample, and many other fine books deserve to be mentioned. Much more information about Canadian crime writers can be found at www.crimewriterscanada.com. Some areas of the country are missing from my quick tour, because I did not know a recent release that had been set there. If you know one, please comment! Meanwhile there are only twelve more days till Christmas, and eight till Hanukah. Time is passing.
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
More on book covers
If a publisher contacts me to design a cover, the first thing we talk about (after time frame) is, naturally, remuneration. I charge over $800, often more, because of the time involved, but I put in a lot more time than most designers. If they want a “quick and dirty” cover, I pass.
It’s funny (and sad) how publishers just present a cover to their authors and say, “Here it is. We hope you like it.” Unspoken, but certainly understood is also, “Like it or lump it.” The only thing the average author might be allowed to comment on and possibly have changed is something like typeface or type size. Where you’re completely stuck is on the image used. If the author gets saddled with what he/she considers a poor or inappropriate image, that’s when the publisher will pull out the time-honored sidestep comment: “It’s a marketing decision.” The poor author is stuck.
I have an idea this is what happened to poor Ian. Even authors as important as he is (and with sales to back up that stature) get told off in this manner. Having sat on the publishers’ side of this table, I’m here to tell you that it’s all bullshit. The real situation is either someone important at the publisher has fallen in love with the cover that’s been designed, or they shelled out a fair bit of money to an illustrator (less likely these days) or they commissioned a custom-photographed cover image (ditto). Where this argument really chaps my butt is when they’ve meremly purchased a stock image from a cut-rate supplier like iStock or Fotolia. Want to know what those images cost? About $30.
The reality of the issue is that publishers are cutting corners where they shouldn’t. An in-house designer (mostly who they use) is tasked with creating a cover for a book. They might meet with the editor who also may or may not take the time to sit down and research potential images with the designer. Usually, the designer is given just the sales blurb for the book and that’s the sum total of the knowledge they have to come up with their “appropriate” design. Is it any wonder that more and more seriously bad covers are appearing on bookstore shelves and online book sellers?

Okay, I would like to come up with a year-end list of what our readers consider The Worst Book Covers of 2011. Send me your nominees or post the choices in the comments section below this email. Let’s come up with a Wall of Shame for publishers who really dropped the ball. My nominee is the Rankin book, but I have my eye on some others.
Monday, December 05, 2011
Freeing The Cells
But to hearken back to the title of this post, I discovered an easier – if less productive – way to assuage the demands of the creative beast. FreeCell! How many games of FreeCell does it require to get from the opening sentence of one’s hoped-for novel to that much-desired Finis moment? In the case of my first book, Undertow, it was somewhere north of 10,000 games. It took me almost four years to write that book. Perhaps if I had halved the number of FreeCell games to a mere 5,000, I could have done it much more quickly. But I doubt that. The moderately challenging – if inherently silly – game did calm the fevered mind. And the book did get written.
The message being, I suppose, that writers will do odd things to get the job done.
Later on, I adopted a more complicated stratagem. Spider Solitaire. But that one really was, in the end, counter-productive. Spider Solitaire is much more complicated than FreeCell, and really does challenge; to the point that it’s often hard to think of anything other than getting the game done, and then going on to yet another game, and another, and another. And there being three levels of difficulty, that game is even more deadly in terms of time demands.
And where am I now in my effort to finish my fourth Inspector Stride novel? Back to FreeCell as it happens; 4,631 games played to date. Which could mean that I have only about 5,400 games to go before the novel’s done. Clearly I should play more, and play more often. Seriously, though, games like FreeCell are sometimes a hindrance, but at other times they are relaxing and they reduce stress.
Computers, as we all know, are a mixed blessing. We have instant access to a world of information via the internet – which in itself is another mixed blessing – but too often there is too much temptation to wander off into non-productive pursuits. Writing is like life generally. I have a self-imposed end-of-January deadline for the new Stride, and it’s a tossup whether I will actually make it. An old story; but hopefully not with a surprise ending.
To finish up this post, I will essay a piece that I will presumptuously call A Tale of Two Novels.
A month ago I dipped into my first Jack Reacher novel. It was only about five years ago, at the Left Coast Crime gathering in Bristol, UK, that I discovered there was such a creation as Jack Reacher. Lee Child was one of the keynote authors at the gathering, and he made a short speech, in which he talked about his protagonist. Like Reacher, himself, Lee Child is very tall, if not nearly as bulky. (I think Reacher tops out at about 250 pounds.) Child explained to the audience that he came up with the character’s name because, being very tall, he was often asked during visits to supermarkets, usually by older, tiny persons of the female persuasion, if he could please reach them down an item from one of the upper shelves. He then began to think of himself as a “reacher”, and thus the character’s name came to him.
I liked his story a lot, and I still do. And I wish I could say that I liked the Reacher novel that I am reading – The Affair – as much. Sadly, I do not. I am fairly certain that the book is another bestseller for Mr. Child, and good for him. But for me, despite some interesting writing and a lot of information about the United States Army, particularly the Military Police part, I am finding that my attention wanders often. It’s not a long book, and a month after starting it, it’s still not finished. Worse, I don’t really have much interest in finding out “whodunit”, who did slash the throats of all those radiantly beautiful women near an American Army base in the deep south. My main quibble with the book is the “soldier-as-superman” gambit. At one point in the narrative, Reacher goes one on four – or is it one on six? – with a collection of large and ugly local redneck inbreds, and quickly demolishes the lot of them, sending them limping back to their caves, or holes in the ground, or wherever. In another scene he casually shoots another brute in the forehead and sends his two equally odious companions scampering back to their hovels in mortal fear and dread. None of it – for me – rings true. It’s seems to me a superficial construct.

Then, in one of those bizarre incidents that drive serious film lovers mad with frustration, all prints of the 35 mm master were somehow lost, and this brilliant film appeared to have vanished from the world forever. Happily, another print was eventually found in a warehouse. But then there was another long delay while ownership of the print was sorted out. Happily it was sorted out.
The film is now available on DVD in the original 96-minute version. I commend it to anyone who enjoys films of intelligence and substance. The same recommendation, of course, is made for the book.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Folksy Titles
Friday, December 02, 2011
Judging Covers
We pleasantly discussed our destinations. He was going to North Carolina to see to his tattoo business. And so it began. I politely asked if he had done the work on his arms, etc.