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!

There have been many articles written about how to be a successful writer. Of the ones I have read, all have mentioned that you can’t be a good writer without being a reader. My advice to people who want to be writers is to read voraciously in the genre you are interested in. I have read over a thousand mysteries, starting with my dad reading them to me before I could read. That was actually one of the ways I learned to read.

Reading mysteries helped me develop a character and a style that is comfortable for me. It is a style that combines many aspects of several different authors. But my main influence was Robert Parker and his private detective, Spenser. I used the name Spencer, with a letter change, as an homage to Parker’s Spenser.

I have many favorite mystery authors, but when it comes to Spencer’s character there are only a few who influenced me, those being Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Spencer is smart, but not quite as ingenious as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot who can sit in their favorite chaisr and ponder a problem. Spencer has to go out and “shake the trees until something falls out.” [Read more…]

As I write and edit, I constantly find myself scratching my head about American English and wondering how anyone manages to communicate or, moreso, how someone learns it as a second language.

The job of an author is not easy. Let’s skip over the plotting and character development and structure… all the easy things. Let’s assume all that is perfect. Then comes the part of putting it down on paper. The words an author uses have to convey his/her thoughts. And that’s where it gets hard. The picture is of James Joyce’s editing effort on just two pages from Finnegans Wake. That’s insane! If he had been working on a computer, the delete button would have been worn out.

But I think an author has an advantage over someone trying to have a conversation. The author gets to use the delete button, or a red pen. When we are speaking, we can’t delete the words. How many times have any of us said, “Well, that’s not what I meant.” And how many have led to arguments? …just because of miscommunication.

And those instances are between people who speak the language. For those who are trying to learn it, the following examples are on my list of headscratchers. See if you agree. Some are interesting rules. Where grammar is an issue, and not just a lack of any sense, I defer to Webster and/or the Chicago Manual of Style. [Read more…]

My last blog left Thomas Midgley having solved the engine knock problem by adding leaded gas to the world’s troubles. At the time, lead was a known poison that could lead to all kinds of medical problems, just a few being blindness, kidney failure, and cancer. The EPA estimated in 1985 that five thousand Americans died every year from lead related heart disease.

That problem solved, Midgley turned his attention to refrigerators. Refrigerators for home use had been invented in 1913, and in 1923 Frigidaire came out with the first self-contained unit. But they had one worrisome problem – they tended to explode. The agents used for cooling were sulfur dioxide and ammonia – corrosive and toxic and flammable. If they leaked, which they tended to do, the results were explosive. Midgley started working on it and came up with a combination of chlorine, fluorine and carbon. He called it Freon, and it later became known as CFC. It was non-flammable and non-toxic and non-corrosive. Freon became an immediate success. As well as solving the refrigerator problem, it was used in air conditioners and as a propellant in spray cans.

Midgley was awarded the Priestly Medal by the American Chemical Society in 1941. In his acceptance speech, he stated he was glad his inventions gave citizens such life-improving benefits. [Read more…]

Thomas Midgley was a chemist and inventor who held over one hundred patents. What he is best known for—and no one I have asked has heard of him, so I’m not sure how well known he is—is affecting the lives of everyone on the planet… everywhere… and not in a good way. Many have died.

In Cold Justice, Stosh asks Spencer what he’s going to do if Chicago passes its ban on leaded fuel.  Spencer’s baby-blue ’67 Mustang drinks leaded fuel. If that happens, he’ll have to buy gas in the suburbs. But the likelihood of that bill passing is low. Over two thousand gas station owners wouldn’t be happy. New York city had tried the same ban in the mid-seventies and the courts overturned it.

It all started in 1921. With a degree in mechanical engineering, Midgley went to work for Dayton Research Labs, a subsidiary of General Motors (GM). He was assigned the job of solving the problem of knocking in auto engines and realized he needed an additive. He started with iodine, thinking that the red dye would absorb heat, and worked his way through the periodic table. The elements had no effect… until he tried lead, or specifically, tetraethyl lead (TEL). TEL, a highly toxic compound discovered in 1854, solved the knocking problem.  TEL was described in 1922 by a Du Pont executive as “a colorless liquid of sweetish odor, very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead poisoning almost immediately.” (Smithsonian) People who knew better later denied they knew TEL was poisonous.

The oddity here was that GM had already been selling an ethanol gasoline blend which burned relatively clean and reduced the knocking substantially. The problem was that it couldn’t be patented, so GM couldn’t make any money from it—perhaps not so odd after all. So they sought an additive that had dollar signs attached to it. Unfortunately, the dollar signs were also good for the morticians. They called their new money maker Ethyl. I have memories as a kid of my dad saying, “Fill ‘er up with ethyl.” They couldn’t call it lead… after all, that was already known to be poisonous. [Read more…]

I have been lucky to have an idea for the next Spencer mystery before I finish the current book… until now. I have what I think is a great first paragraph and I know how, in the end, Spencer is going to catch the culprit. But I have no idea what the story is.

The first paragraph was sparked by this photograph I took a few years ago of the new fireboat at Navy Pier in Chicago. Most cameras these days have the option to choose a foreground color and make everything else shades of grey. The fireboat is obviously red. The photograph is pretty stunning and hangs on my basement wall. As I was walking past the picture one day I got the idea for this first paragraph for the next book:

The drizzle started during the drive to the cemetery. Rosie and I were in the Lincoln behind the hearse, holding hands in the back seat. She had forced me to bring an umbrella, even though I was sure it wouldn’t have the nerve to rain. On the way out, I had grabbed Mom’s favorite. It was bright red. Rosie had given me a look, but it was exactly the statement I wanted to make. Her dress and my suit were black, as were the hearse and the Lincoln and most of the cars in the procession. That was enough somber.

[Read more…]

 

In the fifth book of the Spencer Manning series (the working title is A Frame for Joey), Carol’s son, Billy, discovers an Alaskan husky in the cold outside their door. It has no collar, and of course Billy wants to keep it. But there are complications.

Billy wants to name it, but Carol won’t let him because it needs to go back to its owner. The fact that the dog needs a name takes away the drama of where the dog ends up, but there’s a lot of plot along the way. I’d like Spencer fans to name the dog.

In the book, Carol and Billy decide what the name is, but Carol tells Billy since Spencer has been so good to them, they need to think of a name that is somehow pertinent to Spencer. So, think back over the books and think of a name Spencer might call his dog, and tell me why you came up with that name.

The contest will be run on this blog page. To submit a name, simply post a comment. The contest will close April 9. Spencer will be the judge.

There will be three prizes. The fan who submits the chosen name will have their name included in the acknowledgments, receive a signed copy of the book, and have a character named after them if they choose to do that. The second and third place submittals can choose between having a character named after them or a signed copy of the book.

I’m anxious to see what you come up with.

 

I recently played a concert with the Elgin Community College jazz band (trumpet). One of the tunes was Miles Davis’ version of “Bye Bye Blackbird,” and I transcribed his beautiful solo. As I was doing that, I started thinking about creating art, in this case the difference between playing an instrument and writing. I’ve been playing for some fifty years. I came to a realization that astounds me, and I wondered why I had never thought about it before.

The difference has to do with revisions. Under normal conditions (without springtails!), it takes me about six months to write a Spencer Manning mystery. That involves any number of revisions and editing rounds. Every author faces that and has that luxury. I say ‘luxury’ because we have the opportunity to revise what we write—many times—to make it the best we can. Famous authors need that luxury just as much as the rest of us. An example of that is this page from James Joyce’s revisions of Finnegan’s Wake.

[Read more…]