I was recently asked to write a blog about my books and food. My first thought was that I wouldn’t have enough material for a paragraph much less a blog. After all, my books are about Spencer Manning and the cases he works on, not food. But after some thought I realized food is an integral part of my books and Spencer’s life for several reasons. The first is, fictional characters need to eat too—albeit fictional food. The second is, food plays a major part in advancing the story, especially in a mystery novel.

As the cases develop, Spencer needs to let the reader know what he is thinking so the reader can be involved in trying to figure out who did it. And what better way to do that than to have Spencer converse with other characters. He dines twice a week with Lieutenant Stanley “Stosh” Powolski of the Chicago police and less often with his romantic interest, Detective Rosie Lonnigan. Gino’s East, one of Chicago’s favorite spots for deep dish pizza, is one of their favorites, as is Carson’s for ribs. Over a meal, they talk about the case.

Another reason for including food in the stories is purely selfish. I get to eat vicariously through Spencer. He gets to eat all the things I shouldn’t… steaks, burgers, pizza, ribs, lasagna. And he doesn’t have to eat vegetables. And he frequents some pretty fancy restaurants. My books are set in Chicago during the 1980s, so I had to rely on my memory and research to be historically accurate. Some restaurants are still here thirty-five years later. Some are not. And some exist only in my imagination.

In the first book in the now seven-book series, Change of Address, Spencer frequents one of the best steak houses in Chicago… Gibsons, one of my top three culinary experiences.  But in that same book, Spencer and Rosie dine at Stantons. It’s a restaurant on the shore of Lake Michigan in a North Shore suburb of Chicago. Every table overlooks the lake and Spencer and Kelly sit on the terraced veranda with drinks before dinner. The most frequent comment I have had about my books is “Where is that restaurant? I want to eat there!” Unfortunately, it’s only in my imagination. Also in my imagination is the deli next to Spencer’s office.

But the place that holds the books together is McGoons, where Spencer is known by name and often meets with one of his many sidekicks for steak and beer and to discuss a case.  McGoons is a creation of bits and pieces from my memory of several Chicago pubs.

In the third book, Missing Boy, Spencer visits the original McDonald’s (after Kroc took over) in Des Plaines and laments plans to tear it down. A museum was later built on the site. And as I was writing this, I realized Spencer has never had a Chicago hot dog. I’ll have to fix that in the next book. Bon appetit!

How is your grandmother’s roast like a period inside a quote mark?

Somewhere along my path as a kid I heard the following story. Many of you probably have also. A youngster is watching his mother prepare the dinner roast. She cuts a chunk off of each end of the roast, sets it in the center of the pan, then surrounds it with potatoes and vegetables. He asks her why she cut the ends off. She tells him she learned how to cook from her mother, and that was how her mother did it. He asks why Grandma did that. Mom doesn’t know.

When Grandma arrives, he tells her that Mom has something to ask her and takes her into the kitchen. Mom asks. Grandma replies, “Because I only had a small pan, and the roast was always too big.”

In the case of the roast, the action had outlived the reason. Mom’s pan was big enough. The same lack of logic holds true for the period inside a closing quote mark.

Consider the following sentence.

The audience loved it when he sang “Stardust.”

A song title belongs in quotes, but the period certainly isn’t part of the title, yet Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) (and also AP, MLA and Strunk) wants the period inside the quote mark. The same rule applies to a comma. The rule for a question mark and an exclamation point are more reasonable. Both appear inside the quote mark if they belong to the quote and outside if they do not. Other punctuation, such as a semicolon or a dash, always appear outside the quote mark. So why not periods?

The reason has to do with typesetters. In the pre-digital era, type spaces were fixed width, and placing the period outside the quote mark would leave what looked to be an extra space.

William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, writing in 1959, noted that “[t]ypographical usage dictates the comma [or period] be inside the marks, though logically it seems not to belong there.”

In today’s digital world, just like Grandma’s roast, the reason is obsolete. In the early 1900s, the British decided to move into the modern age and place the period outside of the quote mark. But this placement is still traditional in the United States. We on the other side of the pond haven’t given in to logic. Did someone say metric system?

A Drug Affair, the seventh Spencer Manning mystery, is done and will be out mid February. It was a challenge, with more plot roadblocks than I am used to. Here’s a preview:

Stosh and I chatted over the rest of the pizza and finished our beer. By the time we were done we had come up with a skeleton of a plan. If a mouse likes cheese, bring him more cheese.
As I motioned for the check my pager vibrated.
“Stosh, it’s Iverson.”
“Go call, kid. I’ll take care of the check.”
I grabbed my jacket and ran to the car. Iverson answered on the second ring.
“I didn’t want to hear from you, Chief.”
“No. They made a run at Billy.”
My stomach turned, and I tried to keep the pizza down.
“Tell me.”
“About an hour ago, a guy walks up the porch steps of your aunt’s inn. No car. Young guy wearing a light jacket and a ball cap. He walks carefully and silently by my man napping on the porch. As he walks into the lobby he pulls out a gun. Then all hell breaks loose from the back of the inn.”
“Two men. Jesus. We should have had two on watch,” I said.
“Another guy went in the back door. He finds Billy in the kitchen sneaking a piece of cherry pie and grabs him by the collar. Billy yells, and your dog appears out of nowhere and clamps onto the guy’s leg. He’s screaming and pulls his gun and is about to shoot the dog when…

In my last blog I followed the mystery novel from its inception up to the late 1800s. Sherlock Holmes and his powers of deduction had arrived with stories laced with clues and red herrings. While I love Sherlock and have reread Doyle’s stories many times, the writers that my father read to me and who influenced my writing and the development of my PI, Spencer Manning, were waiting in the wings.

In the early 1900s, the British mystery novel made its debut. The stories were set in small villages and involved rich aristocrat families, both as victim and detective. There were many authors, but in 1920 one of the giants appeared on the scene when Agatha Christie published The Mysterious Affair at Styles which introduced her iconic Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Some of Christie’s stories are better than others but they are all fun, light reads. With a different style, much more literary and descriptive (her description of “change ringing” in The Nine Tailors is classic), Dorothy Sayers joined Christie with her detective Lord Peter Wimsey. [Read more…]

Many have asked me what it takes to be a writer. My answer is… be a reader. Read voraciously, especially in your genre of choice. I set down the first words of Change of Address, the first book in my Spencer Manning Mystery series, in the early 80s. But my first exposure to mystery novels was before I knew how to read. My dad was an avid mystery fan, and he read Hammett and Chandler to me when I was five or six.

The true geniuses in any art form were the first ones to create something new, and they were usually treated with disdain and even hatred. Jazz was considered by many to be the music of the devil, and the early jazz musicians led hard lives as they developed a new genre. The early mystery writers invented a new genre that grew and branched into the many sub-species that exist today. Those who write today stand on the shoulders of the giants who started it all. But who were they? I’ll explore that question in this and the next blog.

There are differing opinions as to what was the first mystery novel. It all started in the mid-1880s, and even then there was already a branching in the genre. There were earlier short stories, but the first work of detective fiction is considered by most to be Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, published in 1841. Some think the first mystery novel is The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Others disagree because it is much more than a mystery novel. [Read more…]

The seventh book in the Spencer Manning mystery series is about one-third done. This book is about drugs, a problem Spencer has yet to encounter. In the six books I’ve written so far, I’ve known what the basic plot was and who the culprit was. And in four of them I knew how I was going to catch him/her. The work came in surrounding the villain with a cast of possible suspects and filling out the story with clues and red herrings to make it interesting and, well, a mystery.

In this book I have the opposite problem. To borrow a title from Ellery Queen, I have too many suspects. Spencer has an early discussion with Stosh about whom he can trust, and Stosh tells him he can’t trust anyone… Stosh aside of course. But in this book Spencer isn’t working with Stosh.

The crime occurs on the west side of Chicago in a different precinct. At first, the drug problem was simple. It involved the arrest of a kid for possession and selling cocaine. The kid lives on the north shore in the richest congressional district in the country. In the beginning, it involved his mother, her big bucks lawyer, the Chicago police, and a federal agent whom the lawyer is trying to cut a deal with. [Read more…]

Disclaimer: this blog has nothing to do with Spencer Manning Mysteries… except that it also uses the art of placing one word in close proximity to another with some sense of meaning.

You all have seen video and photos of Kilauea erupting. It’s beautiful, and mesmerizing, and destructive, and… ironic. I’ll get to the irony, which is really the point of this piece. Most of us have lists of things we know we shouldn’t do because of the common sense factor, such as “don’t touch a hot stove.” There are, of course, exceptions among us. As a geologist, my number one rule is “don’t live next to a volcano.” Fault lines come in a close second. I would think you wouldn’t need a degree in Geology to realize that, but it seems not to be the case. And there are reasons why people choose to fly in the face of common sense.

The American Indians didn’t have permanent settlements on the coastlines. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes… seem like good places not to build big cities. But the views are great! And commerce beckons. Still, cities on the coastlines are disasters waiting to happen. Mt. Ranier is a sleeping giant, as are all of the other gorgeous mountains in the Cascade Range along the west coast.

A disaster in Seattle (and all of the other cities that lie on the Ring of Fire) is just a matter of time. I do realize that cities were built before the danger was known. But living in Seattle involves a risk. The risk may be negligible… the odds of it erupting in any given lifetime are small, but living next to a volcano, active or dormant, involves a roll of the dice. Seattle will be gone someday.

The island of Hawaii is a paradise. But living there is hard to understand. It sits over the hot spot (source of magma that the plate is moving over) that has created all of the islands in the Emperor seamount chain, including the Hawaiian islands. And it is, and has been for many years, active. Choosing to live there involves a huge risk. The volcanoes that created the other islands are extinct. They have moved off of the hot spot and are wonderful places to live! Hawaii will be one day also as the future island of Loihi, a seamount now forming on the floor of the ocean off of Hawaii’s southern shore, becomes the active island volcano. [Read more…]

I recently tossed a book into the recycle bin. I have thrown a few into the garbage (the ultimate protest) but have switched to being environmentally friendly – perhaps they will be reborn as better reading. We all have run across books that we didn’t finish for one reason or another. My most recent read got me thinking about what causes me to stop reading a book… it wasn’t the one I tossed. The main reason I stop is that it just doesn’t capture my attention… I don’t care about the characters or the plot. I read a lot of mysteries and the mystery had better be set up soon into the book. A book needs to grab the reader on the first page. I make that my number one goal in writing the Spencer Manning Mysteries. It isn’t as easy as it sounds.

How many pages do you give a book before you give up? Or do you persevere to the end just because you started? I usually give it twenty pages or so, and I won’t finish if I have lost interest. If a mystery isn’t mysterious within the first few pages, I lose interest. If there is no romance in the first chapter of a romance novel, what’s the point? But I’ll usually give it a couple of tries before I finally give up. Maybe my mood wasn’t right. [Read more…]

Something you enjoy doing should be relaxing and a stress reliever. Right? You would think so… so would I. But I was recently thinking about suffering musicians… not emotionally from lack of money and the struggle of the game, but physically. I play trumpet. I take great joy in it, but jamming my lips in between a piece of steel and teeth has never been pleasant. I play with a bass player who has to wear a back brace because of the weight of the bass. And he is constantly shaking his hands to try and wave away the pain. Bass players play every measure of every song. And the guitar player has to build up tough calluses before the pain of pressing down on a steel string ends. Being a musician involves pain.

But writing is different. I enjoy writing. When I get up in the morning I wonder what my characters are going to do and what new characters might drop onto the page seemingly from out of the blue. I don’t know if James Joyce had fun writing and rewriting Finnegans Wake. By the looks of his manuscript, maybe not. But for me, the challenge of putting together words to make a story is fun… or so I thought until recently.

I have been checking my blood pressure periodically after finding out a few years back that it was high. Under normal circumstances, a magic pill brings it down to normal, in the 120/80 range. And exercise brings it down even lower—imagine that! After an hour workout it can be 105/65. One of the hats I wear is editor for my publisher, Calumet Editions. I correct a printed copy but then spend hours at the computer transferring the corrections to the file. It is a tedious and painstaking process. One needs to be careful not to miss anything. After a recent two-hour session, I checked my blood pressure and was surprised to see 185/90.

Editing is stressful, so I decided the raised BP was from the stress. But then I tried an experiment. I spend time at the computer doing other things, one of which is working on Spencer’s next mystery. So I sat down and wrote for two hours. I expected a much better BP… after all, writing is fun! My BP was 178/88. I tried a few other things, like email and Facebook and Twitter (not that I expected those to be relaxing) with the same result. So it evidently doesn’t matter what I’m doing while sitting at the computer… something about it has very bad results. And what will be the result of those bad results? Who knows?

If I were to listen to my conservative thoughts, I would shut down the computer in favor of longevity. But living without computers these days would be tough.

Perhaps the thing that we can’t live without these days is something that I can’t live with. Just checked my BP – 165/85.

The latest Spencer Manning mystery: Death’s Door 

I conducted the following interview with my detective, Spencer Manning, based on questions posed by readers. Some questions led to follow-up questions, and I had to cull out some questions that would have given away plot occurrences. I’ll follow up with interviews of other characters in the future.

 

QUESTION:

You are a big Cubs fan. Who is your favorite Cub?

SPENCER:

(He laughs) “I’d have trouble coming up with one. How about three?”

All right, give me three, but then see if you can narrow it down to one.

“Hmmm. Okay. The three are Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, and Billy Williams. There were better players, but you just won’t find three who loved the game more. It was such fun to watch them. What a shame that they never got to play in a World Series.”

Can you pick one of those three?

“If you’re forcing me to, I guess it would be Ernie. ‘Let’s play two’ will go down in history. But that’s a really tough choice.”

QUESTION:

Do you think the Cubs will win the World Series in your lifetime? [Read more…]