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…]

In my last blog I talked about bad reviews. Every author gets bad reviews. You can’t please everybody, and everybody has an opinion. But, as I pointed out previously, the ones that are irksome are the ones that aren’t fair, like the lady who gave me one star on my first book, Change of Address and ripped it apart. Her reason—she didn’t like mysteries. That’s just not fair. But Mom told me at an early age that life wasn’t always fair and I keep thinking it should be.

My plan was to contrast the bad reviews to the good ones. It seemed like a great idea and an easy task… just pick out the reviews, copy them into the blog and write about them. I wanted to pick a few bad reviews for each book. And there I ran into a problem.

When I started writing I thought it would be fun. And it was, until I decided to get serious about it and see if I could sell some books… to entice someone besides my friends to read them. My publisher laid out a marketing plan that includes Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, public appearances, book contests, and blogs. The writing is still fun… the marketing not so much. He believes blogs are the most important marketing tool, and based on my website activity I’d have to agree. Of around ten thousand clicks on my website last year, about 80 percent were on blog links. [Read more…]

Writing a book is a challenging undertaking. Even more so  is the marketing. Fifty thousand new books are published on Amazon each month. So the challenge is to make your book stand out from the crowd… make it appeal to readers. But readers have different tastes and different goals, so the appeal factor is a moving target. That target can be measured somewhat by looking at reviews, but the inconsistencies in reviews leaves me scratching my head.

Reviews are huge to any business. They drive many things, such as, in this case, qualifying for promotions. Obviously, good reviews are preferred over bad, but I do like constructive criticism. After all, the goal is to become more proficient at whatever the task is. And not everyone is going to like everything. That’s why we have vanilla and chocolate… and butter pecan. But the inconsistencies in reviews leave me scratching my head. Here are some examples.

CHARACTERS

A reader of Dark Alleys wrote: “There is very poor character development and it is hard to feel any empathy for any of the characters.” But another wrote: “In Dark Alleys, Rick juxtaposed plots and well-developed characters make the book a must read!”

I have put a lot of effort into the secondary characters and they have become my friends. A reader posted: “The characters in the books are like good friends and I hope I get to enjoy more time with these.”

A reader of Change of Address wrote: “The character development is also strong in this debut. Spencer alone will bring readers back for the next book. But as regular readers of mystery series know, it is often the secondary characters that keep readers coming back. Here Polad comes through again. The police chief and Spencer’s diner owning friend/first client, and his various friends are all excellent.”

And another: “This novel has a good plot, carefully thought out characters, is well written and keeps you wanting more. I did not want to stop reading.” [Read more…]

In a prior blog I mentioned that good writers need to read books in their genre to get a feel for the process and see how successful authors handled it. When writing mysteries, reading isn’t just about mystery books. I happen to like many different non-fiction genres, including history, biographies, science, and general interest. I am usually reading three or four books at the same time and take notes of interesting facts I come across. Those facts sometimes lead to interesting situations or clues.

When I was writing the latest Spencer book, Death’s Door, I was reading A Fly For the Prosecution by M. Lee Goff, which is concerned with how insect evidence helps solve crimes, and I was thinking about how Spencer would catch the killer. Spoiler alert: the following will discuss the ending of Death’s Door.

The science of forensic entomology was just beginning in the mid 1980s, which is also the time period of Death’s Door. Lee Goff was a professor of entomology at the University of Hawaii and a consultant to the medical examiner for the city of Honolulu. Through many experiments, mostly involving pig carcasses, he discovered that different insects arrive at dead bodies at different times. He also studied the time it takes for insects to develop from larvae.

Flies can arrive at a body within ten minutes. They lay eggs and maggots emerge within a day and feed on the carcass. They attract predators such as ants and wasps and beetles. It’s a lot more complicated than that (other environmental factors such as ambient temperature and moisture figure in), but simply looking at the insect activity can point to the time of death. The maturity of the maggots also provides clues.

In Death’s Door, Rosie accuses Spencer of being fixated on Detective Dunsley’s pant cuffs. Spencer is not a fan of cuffs. That was sparked by a true story from Goff’s book. I try to include period events and facts from the ‘80s, so many things that take place in my books are historically accurate as far as the time period.  Death’s Door takes place in 1985, and I discovered that pant cuffs had made a fashion comeback in… 1985. Serendipity! Dunsley’s cuffs play a part in the story.

Goff tells the story of a true case from Texas. A woman was found with the mangled remains of a grasshopper caught in her clothing. No one paid attention to the grasshopper, but the parts were collected as evidence. One part of the grasshopper was missing… the left hind leg. The police brought in several suspects for questioning. One of the suspects was wearing pants with cuffs, and someone suggested that his cuffs be inspected. A grasshopper leg was found in the cuff, and the fracture marks matched the grasshopper. Despite the defense attorney’s assertion that “grasshoppers always break their legs like that,” the man was convicted of murder.

The moral of the story: be careful what fashion choices you make!