Haiti Noir

 

One of the latest installments in the Akashic Books noir series doesn't look at just one city, as the other books have, but at an entire nation — one where just getting through the day is an exercise in life-as-noir. The magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck not far from Port-au-Prince almost a year ago, on January 12, 2010, with an estimated 230,000 people killed, 300,000 injured and 1,000,000 made homeless. Since then, over 1,000 people have died from cholera, and violent protests have broken out, shutting down schools, businesses and the international airport.

Award-winning novelist Edwidge Danticat had been working for a year as editor on Akashic's Haiti Noir anthology when the earthquake struck, and she was worried some of the stories would become irrelevant or not ring true, but ultimately felt that didn't happen. In fact, she solicited three earthquake-related stories that found their way into the book. She tried to get a mixture of literary styles, adding she "was glad reading the other books in the series to see that noir did not only mean detective stories. We have many variations on the detective story here; however each writer defined noir for him- or herself and came up with something powerful. The stories are dark in that bad things happen in them. There is of course a Haitian sensibility because the stories are set in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora. They are about both individuals and the larger society."

As Publishers Weekly noted, the anthology contains several stories that feature the practice of Vodou including Kettly Mars's supernatural thriller "Paradise Inn," in which a detective investigating police corruption is transferred to a remote village and falls under the seductive power of a fearsome innkeeper and her succubus-like daughter, and Gary Victor's "The Finger," where a criminal's trophy of an expensive ring, with its dead former owner's finger still attached, comes back to haunt him.

The launch party featuring Danticat and other contributors will take place at Symphony Space in New York City on January 26. Ten percent of the profits from sales of Haiti Noir will be donated to an organization Danticat chose, the Lambi Fund of Haiti, a nonprofit that helps fund Haitian community-based groups promoting economic justice, democracy and sustainable development. 

 

 

That is to say, I challenge you to look through the following reading challenges for 2011 and not be able to find a single one that interests you. There's quite a variety to choose from, and most don't require a huge time commitment (some even have as few as one to two books to read).

CRIME FICTION

Criminal Plot Challenge
This is the first-ever such challenge from Jen Forbus, in which she asks you to read 6 books in 2011, one from six different categories such as a book by a new-to-you-author who's blurbed a book you enjoyed.

The Alphabet in Crime Fiction 2011
Kerrie Smith is once again holding her crime alphabet challenge, which does require a time commitment, but it will help you read quite a few books next year, a worthwhile endeavor. She asks that you read one book each week starting in January that's related to the letter of the week, either the first letter of a book's title, the first letter of an author's first name, or the first letter of the author's surname.

Mystery and Suspense Challenge
Book Chick City challenges you to read 12 mystery and suspense novels and upload your reviews to the blog. She'll also have a monthly drawing for a book prize, and all participants receive a free ARC of The Survivor by Sean Slater.

Cruisin' thru the Cozies
Socrates' Book Review Blog theme, as the title suggests, is the "cozy" mystery, and even one book will put you in the "Snoop" category.

Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge
If you're a fan of the Golden Age, this challenge is for you. Read mystery books published prior to 1960, with a prize for everyone who completes the challenge. You can review or not, blog or not, it's up to you.

INTERNATIONAL

Carrie Kitzmiller is holding her second annual Ireland Reading Challenge, and any book written by an Irish author, set in Ireland, or involving Irish history or Irish characters, counts for the challenge; fiction, non-fiction, poetry, audiobooks, children's books, whatever suits your fancy. All participants will be entered for a prize giveaway of a copy of Tipperary by Frank Delaney.

If you're a fan of fiction down under, join the  2011 Aussie Author Challenge. It helps if you have a blog, so you can review and link back.

S. Krishna's Books is hosting the South Asian Challenge 2011, where you read at least one book by a South Asian author or about South Asia (i.e. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and the Maldives).

If you've been inspired by the recent wave of Scandinavian fiction to hit the U.S., you might want to try the Nordic Challenge, including any book by any author born in a Nordic country (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and/or Sweden) or a book set in a Nordic country.

Speaking of things north, Canada isn't left out — John Mutford's 4th annual Canadian Book Challenge started in July 2010, but it continues through to July 1st, 2011, which happens to be Canada Day. You'll need to hurry, though, because you'll need to read 13 books.

If you'd prefer to think more, well, globally, sign up for the 2011 Global Reading Challenge, and choose at least one novel each from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America, South America and a "Seventh" continent (Antarctica or your own "seventh" setting, e.g. the sea, the space, a supernatural/paranormal world, history, the future – you name it).

MISCELLANEOUS

The Book Vixen's challenge is relatively simple — it's the Outdo Yourself Challenge, in which you read more books in 2011 than you did in 2010 (in any format).

Here's another easy one — the Off the Shelf Challenge. Go to that To Be Read pile of yours and read those books you own copies of, but have never got around to reading.

The What's in a Name Challenge has more rules than most, but it's intriguing. You pick a pick in 6 different categories with themes such as a book with a number in the title and a book with evil in the title.

If you enjoy reading the adventures of V.I. Warshawski, Stephanie Plum, Sharon McCone or Tess Monaghan, sign up for the  Strong Heroine Reading Challenge.

Want to read more local authors or books set in your local environs? Try the Hometown Challenge.

Like you novels dark with crumbling castles, and a little horror and romance? If so, the Gothic Reading Challenge is for you.

If you haven't jumped on one of the newer literary trends, then you here's your chance to Get Steampunked (think Jules Verne meets Terry Gilliam).

Speaking of trends, if you get a Kindle or Nook for Christmas, hurry on over to the 2011 E-Book Challenge.

Want more? The blog A Novel Challenge has dozens for you (past, present and future). 

Fortified Serials

 

If you're a fan of forensic and psychological dramas à la Dexter and Criminal Minds, you might be interested in a couple of nonfiction books released this fall. Both deal with serial killers, one tied to the birth of forensic science and the other a contemporary story of redemption.

The Killer of Little Shepherds is from the pen of Douglas Starr, co-director of the Center for Science and Medical Journalism and a professor of journalism at Boston University. Starr's book neatly dovetails the story of French serial killer Joseph Vacher and the achievements of groundbreaking criminologist Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne. Vacher is thought to have raped, killed, and mutilated at least 25 people between 1894 and 1897, while Lacassagne helped pioneer crime scene analysis, body decomposition and early profiling and testified during Vacher's trial. Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review and Kirkus called it a "well-documented mix of forensic science, narrative nonfiction, and criminal psychology." That fits the book nicely, following as it does the determination of one man trying to bring criminal justice into the modern age, even as autopsies were still taking place on the kitchen table of a victim's home.

 

The second true-crime book, In with the Devil, tells the story of Jimmy Keene, who grew up outside Chicago as the son of a former police officer and went from promising high-school football player to convicted drug dealer. One year into his 10-year sentence, he was approached by the same prosecutor who had handled his case, with an interesting proposition in hand: go inside one of the most dangerous prisons in the U.S., befriend murderer Larry Hall, whom the prosecutor had also sent to prison, and get Hall to confess to the murder of two young women and tell where the body of one missing victim was buried. If he succeeded, Keene would get an unconditional release, but if he failed, he'd have to complete his term. If found out, he could be killed. Keene's story is co-written by investigative reporter Hillel Levin and is being developed into a movie with Martin Scorsese as director.

Sheldon Russell is on "The Insane Train"

 

Author Sheldon Russell is a former Oklahoma public school English teacher and professor emeritus from the University of Central Oklahoma, who currently lives in Guthrie, Oklahoma, with his artist wife, Nancy. Russell has previously won the Oklahoma Book Award and the Langum Prize for Historical Literature but has also penned crime fiction titles, beginning with Empire, in 1993, and The Yard Dog: A Mystery in 2009, which introduced the one-armed railroad detective (or "yard dog"), Hook Runyon, set during World War II.

In Russell's follow-up novel, The Insane Train, the Baldwin Insane Asylum in Barstow, California, has recently burned to the gound, costing many inmates their lives. Hook Runyon is put in charge of security for a train that is to transport the survivors and the head of the asylum, Dr. Baldwin, to a new location in Oklahoma. Hook hires a motley crew of down-on-their luck army veterans to help, but things start to go awry when several inmates and attendants are found dead, and Dr.Baldwin seems increasingly disoriented and incapable of running operations. With the help of a nurse, Andrea, Hook begins investigating the suspicious deaths and uncovers a trail of revenge that has been a long time in the planning.

Russell stopped by IRTM for a Q&A, and you can also enter the giveaway for a free signed copy of Insane Train (via details at the bottom of this post), a book Publishers Weekly deemed one of the top mystery books of 2010.

IRTM: You apparently based Insane Train in part on a real-life event. Can you tell us a little more about that?

SR: Perhaps not so much an event as a series of events.  When I was a child, I had an uncle who returned from WWII with serious mental issues.  I went with my father to have him committed and that experience left an indelible mark on me.  Later, as a college student, I visited this same institution and saw the process from a different perspective.  Stark images, some too awful to describe here, have remained with me over many years. 

All of this, in addition to years of studying psychology, came together to inspire THE INSANE TRAIN.  After all, what better than having Hook Runyon in trouble on a train?  Contrary to what one might think, THE INSANE TRAIN is not a dark book.  All that’s human can be found in mental disorder, and humor often shines brightest from out of the darkness.

IRTM: You taught English and education, yet you've focused on historical fiction and nonfiction. How did you develop this passion and turn it into a literary career?

SR: Well, I have a minor in ancient history and studied the classics as an English major.  But I think my upbringing influenced my interest in history as much as my studies.  I grew up on a cattle ranch in the Gloss Mountains of Oklahoma.  It was an isolated existence, and I was surrounded by adults who were products of The Great Depression and WWII.  I listened to stories about those events my whole life.  In many ways the past became more real to me than the present.

I’ve always enjoyed museums, antiquity, old books, and  biography.  I love wandering around in the past and discovering things long forgotten.  Historical fiction indulged all of these passions.   

IRTM: Writing a historical novel can be tricky, having to conduct a lot of research to get details as accurate as possible. That must be even more difficult when dealing with mental illness practices of the day, in this case, the 1940s. Where did you look for inspiration and background information for the events depicted in Insane Train?

SR: While digging through the historical society achieves one day, I came upon an article about a fire that destroyed a private mental institution shortly after Oklahoma had become a state.  Many of the inmates, a term used for mental patients in those days, were buried in a mass grave.  At about the same time, the federal government turned over a fort to the state, and the decision was made to convert it to a mental institution.  They transferred the surviving patients to the fort by train.  This was, of course, a perfect situation for Hook Runyon, railroad yard dog.

I learned to research as a graduate student and refined those skills as a professor.  For me, it’s been one of the more enjoyable tasks of writing.  I first read widely about my subject and then narrow it to specifics.  I read books about the criminally insane early in my research for THE INSANE TRAIN. 

But one of the last things I went to was the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a reference published by the American Psychological Association. While the reference bolstered my confidence as a writer and opened up my thinking, I worked hard at keeping it from showing through in my writing.  I try never to state facts about anything.  Readers of historical fiction don’t want to read about history.  They want to live it through the characters.   

IRTM: Where did the inspiration for Runyon and this series originate? He's certainly an unusual and fascinating protagonist even living in a caboose.

SR: As a youngster I was fascinated by the rail yards, the steam engines thundering in and out all through the night, the smell of heat and creosote, the men in their oil-soaked overalls.  None was more mysterious and interesting than yard dogs, railroad security agents, men known for their lack of fear and their quick execution of justice.  They dealt with desperate men and in the most dangerous of places.  Stories about the ferocity of yard dogs abounded, so my interest in them was inevitable. 

In my view, journeys make the best stories, and men with flaws make the best protagonists.  The railroad, the caboose, and Hook Runyon all fit the bill.

IRTM: The first novel in the series, Yard Dog, deals with a Nazi POW camp in Oklahoma. I having a feeling that many people probably aren't aware there was such a place in the 1940s. Do you feel the teacher in you coming out a bit in these novels by way of helping introduce readers to places and events they might not have learned about otherwise?

SR: THE YARD DOG is set in Camp Alva, Okla., a POW camp that was designed to hold the most dangerous Nazi prisoners near the end of WWII.  At it’s height it contained over 5,000 prisoners. 

There were many POW camps in the United States at that time, often located in isolated areas for security reasons.  I’m always surprised at how many people are unaware of this.  Even the locals, particularly the younger ones, have a limited knowledge of the prison and what happened within its walls. 

My priority in writing is to entertain, so I resist the urge to teach.  That said, I do believe that curiosity is an inherent human trait and that most of us enjoy learning something new, particularly when it’s painless.

IRTM: Author James R. Benn called your writing "mid-century American noir." Would you agree with that description, as related to the Runyon series?

SR: Yes, in large part.  Hook is certainly hard-bitten and cynical.  He drinks too much, and it’s not always clear on which side of the law he’s operating.  He’s been known to drop the hat pretty fast and has little compunction about doing whatever it takes to survive. 

On the other hand, he has intellectual curiosity.  He reads, collects rare books, and has an affinity for the underdog.  Hook likes his women smart and strong, loves his old dog, Mixer, and cuts a lot of slack for his sidekicks, who tend to be off center.  

IRTM: You list Conroy, Steinbeck and McMurtry as authors you admire. Do you feel they have influenced your writing, and are there any others in the crime fiction world who have made an impression?

SR:  I  learned from Conroy to worry more about quality and less about quantity.  From Steinbeck, I learned the power of place and from McMurtry, the structure of narrative well told.  I’m still learning from the world of crime writers, Robert B Parker’s incisive use of dialogue, John MacDonald’s seamless  transitions in his Travis McGee series, James Patterson’s cliff- hanging suspense. 

But most of all, I just read to fill the well because ideas spawn ideas, and ideas are a writer’s currency.

IRTM:  Your next Hook Runyon novel features a railway tunnel in the Arizona desert that was under guard during WWII. What's next for Runyon in this book and beyond?

SR: The neat thing about this series, from my point of view, is that I can couple up Hook’s caboose to Frenchy’s steamer and move him to the next trouble spot.  This kind of flexibility permits new situations, places, and people.  Not only does this keep the stories fresh and vigorous for my readers but for me as well. 

In the next book Hook comes face to face with a changing world, a world no longer obsessed with World War II.  Like after any traumatic experience, adjustments have to be made to new realities.  Hook is no exception.  

I’ve a couple ideas brewing for future books beyond that and plan to keep Hook in trouble for as long as there’s interest.

IRTM: Since you're an Okie — Woodie Guthrie or Garth Brooks?

SR: I’m going with Woodie here.  You gotta’ love a man who looked out for the underdog, had the courage to speak his mind and the nerve to live in immigrant camps while doing it.  It’s something Hook Runyon might do.   

Russell Sheldon is giving away a signed copy of his book, Insane Train, to one lucky tour visitor. Go to his book tour page, enter your name, e-mail address, and this PIN, 8399, for your chance to win. Entries from In Reference to Murder will be accepted until 12:00 Noon (PT) tomorrow. No purchase is required to enter or to win. The winner (first name only) will be announced on his book tour page next week.

A Trio of Worthy Debuts

 It's always a pleasure to discover new novelists who have written works that compare favorably to those of more-established authors. On a recent train trip to Vermont to see family, I had the luxury of time (it's an 11-hour ride), and happily read my way through the autumn countryside views and three debut novels.

Hilary Davidson has been known in crime fiction circles for a while due to her short stories, published in such venues as ThugLit, A Twist of Noir, Rose and Thorn, CrimeFactory and Spinetingler, with her story "Anniversary" selected for A Prisoner of Memory: And 24 of the Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories in 2008. She's also a travel writer and her debut novel The Damage Done features travel journalist Lily Moore, who returns to New York upon the news that her sister Claudia, a recovering heroin addict, has allegedly drowned in her bathtub on the anniversary of their mother's suicide—only to learn the corpse isn't that of her sister, but a lookalike stranger who's been posing as Claudia. Thus begins a frantic search for her missing sister and the murderer of the stranger (with the assistance of her best friend Jessie and two sympathetic cops) that may involve Claudia's former lover, wealthy Tariq Lawrence, and Lily's ex-fiancé, real-estate tycoon Martin Sklar. Davidson maintains the suspense at a high level but also manages terrific character development, vivid imagery, and an engaging mystery, to boot. Her next novel, The Next One to Fall, is due out October 2011 and will be one to look for.

Helen Grant worked in marketing for ten years to fund her love of travelling, eventually moving to Bad Müenstereifel in Germany. It was exploring the legends of that beautiful historic town that inspired her to write her first novel (after having a few supernatural short stories published), The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, which is set there and features local folk tales and legends. Publishers Weekly called Grant's debut "a charming horror novel," but that's a good description, dealing as it does with 10-year-old Pia Kolvenbach, whose grandmother accidentally sets herself on fire and burns to death. Becoming an outcast afterward, Pia's only friend is the most unpopular boy in her class, nicknamed StinkStefan. The duo begin visiting an elderly man who entertains them with folk tales that Pia and StinkStefan hope will help them solve the mystery of local girls who have gone missing, including Katharina Linden—a girl last seen alive by Pia. Although the mystery is an integral part of the novel, its real strength lies in the pitch-perfect setting and the coming-of-age lessons that teach Pia the adult world is even darker than ghost stories and all too real.

Avner Mandelman was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War. He started out writing short stories (a recurring theme for these debuters!), and his story collection Talking to the Enemy was chosen by Kirkus as one of the 25 best books of 2005 and by the ALA as the first recipient of the Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. His first novel is the thriller The Debba—a mythical Arab hyena that can turn into a man and lure Jewish children away from their families to teach them the language of the beasts. To the Arabs, he is a heroic national symbol; to the Jews, he is a terrorist; to the novel's protagonist David Starkman, the Debba is a controversial play written by his war-hero father that was only performed only once and caused a massive riot. David had renounced his Israeli citizenship and moved to Canada, but when he learns his estranged father has been gruesomely murdered and the Will stipulates David stage the play within 45 days, he returns to his homeland and gets drawn into a world where the sins of the fathers are painfully and dangerously revisited upon the sons. It's a biting and pensive debut work that also turns a microscope upon the unrelenting Arab-Israeli conflict.

It's NoirCon!

 

If you're in the Philadelphia area, there's still time to register for all or part of NoirCon 2010, held primarily at the Society Hill Playhouse, 507 South 8th Street.

There are panels and events through Sunday, including Friday's "Pornography in Noir Fiction," a panel with Reed F. Coleman, Jay Gertzman and Christa Faust; Philadelphia Noir celebrating the anthology with authors Meredith Anthony, Keith Gilman,  Dennis Tafoya, Jim Zervanos, Duane Swierczynski and Carlin Romano; an interview of George Pelecanos by Laura Lippman; "Noir Poetry" by Daniel Hoffman, Robert Polito and Ed Pettit; and "Writers on Noir" with Vicki Hendricks, Reed Farrel Coleman, William Heffernan, Seth Harwood with Cameron Ashley (Crime Factory).

Saturday and Sunday highlights include "Through a Rearview Darkly: A Revisionist History of Noir" by  Megan Abbott and Anthony Neil Smith; and a panel with authors in Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying! (from Busted Flush Press), including Patti Abbott, Scott Cupp, Christa Faust, Scott Phillips, S.J. Rozan and Reed F. Coleman.

The keynote address will be given on Saturday by playwright Joan Schenkar, biographer of Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Miss Highsmith), who told the Philadelphia Inquirer (in answer to what makes a noir writer?), "The noir author is someone who is compelled to walk always on the dark side of the street, looking for answers that are not there to questions that are barely formulable, articulating the very interesting American obsession with murder and with what murder does for you."

Vicki Delany's "Negative Image"

Author Vicki Delany took early retirement from her job as a systems analyst in the high-pressure financial world to take a year off travelling across North Americ before finally settling down in bucolic Prince Edward County, Ontario, where "she rarely wears a watch." Her two mystery series take full advantage of the rural Canadian settings where she lives, including the historical Klondike Gold Rush mysteries and the Smith and Winters novels, set in a traditional British Columbia village.

Negative Image is the fourth Smith and Winters installment featuring the young Constable Molly Smith and her mentor, hard-edged Trafalgar City Police Sergeant John Winters, whose wife Eliza is a former supermodel. The story centers on famous photographer Rudolph Steiner who arrives in town to reconnect with the woman who left him twenty-five years ago (to marry another man), none other than Eliza Winters. When Steiner is found murdered in his luxury hotel room, suspicion falls on Eliza, and Sergeant Winters is forced into the most difficult decision of his life: loyalty to his job or to his wife. Meanwhile, Constable Molly Smith has her own troubles including a series of breakins has the peaceful town in an uproar, her overprotective Mountie boyfriend who is fighting with her colleagues and a vengeful stalker watching her every move.

Vicki's on a promotional tour for the novel and stopped by In Reference to Murder for a chat.

IRTM:  Negative Image is a book that explores the meaning of family, as well as the forces that bind or separate them. Without giving too much of the plot away, can you elaborate on that theme?

VD: Family dynamics are important in all my books. I like to explore various types of families and relationships and ask what works and what doesn’t. In Negative Image I ask the question: What would you do if you believe the person you trust most in the world has betrayed you? What would you do if you discover that the person you trust most in the world believes you capable of betrayal?

A visitor to Trafalgar is murdered and Sergeant John Winters begins to fear that Eliza, his wife of twenty-five years, isn’t the woman he thinks she is. Another long term marriage ends, and a new relationship is getting off to a very rocky start. Part of the reason I love writing, and reading, crime fiction is that a mystery novel is a perfect way of exploring the human psyche under pressure. Let’s see what a suspicion of murder does to a happily married couple or what happens to young love when the female partner works in a traditional male field.

IRTM: The Molly Smith books are set in the fictional town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, which is based on the real town of Nelson. Have you based any fictional characters on real-life personalities, and/or do people in Nelson ever ask if they've become fodder for your writing?

VD: With one exception, I don’t use real life people in my books.  Here’s a line from Winter of Secrets, the third book in the series:

Slightly ahead and to her right a bright red Toyota Echo, dotted with magnetic black circles that made the car look like a giant ladybug, backed out of a parking space. The ladybug hit a patch of ice and slid downhill, very slowly, coming to rest against the bumper of the police car. A tall, slim middle-aged woman climbed out, spiked purple hair, red coat, blue scarf, yellow mittens, and clanging jewelry.

That is a friend of mine, and such a well-known and well-loved person in town I thought it would be fun to include her. I let her read the paragraph first and got her permission to describe her. I have a good relationship with the Nelson City Police and they always say things like they should dress nicely today so they look good in my book. Generally speaking the people in my life are far too boring to provide much fodder for a crime novel.

IRTM: One of the challenges of setting a crime fiction series in a more rural setting is how to work in a series of plausible and unusual murders and/or other crimes in a succession of books (I grew up in a town with a small population—almost exactly the same as Nelson—where violent crime is somewhat rare, so I speak from experience). How do you set about finding plots and storylines that can arise organically from such a setting?

VD: That can be a problem for sure. Trafalgar, like Nelson, is a tourist town and also sees a lot of transients passing through. In Winter of Secrets it’s a group of university students on Christmas vacation who run into trouble, and in Negative Image it’s a photographer in town to do a feature on mountain tourism. I want these to be realistic police novels and not have the townsfolk dropping dead all over the place. On the other hand, the books are fiction. In Nelson, no one can quite remember when the last murder was.

IRTM:  You've indicated that generally speaking, Canadian books, even police procedurals, are concerned as much with personalities and relationships as with solving the crime. What other differences do you see between Canadian  crime fiction authors and those from the U.S. or other countries?

VD: Canadian crime writing tends, generally, to be neither as soft nor as hard as American mystery novels. There are not many, if any, real cozies published in Canada although there are Canadian cozy writers published in the U.S. On the other end of the spectrum, you don’t get many really hard-boiled or noir crime novels set in Canada. Louise Penny’s books are a good example: she created a lovely little village and populated it with interesting people who have very intricate relationships. Generalizing again, but you are more likely in Canadian books to have a resolution arrived at by the detective solving the crime following the clues and by observing the people, than a shoot out with the bad guy. My opinion only. Others may differ.

IRTM: You are currently writing two books a year, which is a pretty amazing schedule. Do you write more than one book at a time or finish one before starting another, and do you find it difficult to keep the two sets of plots and characters separate?

VD: I write one series at a time, but I sometimes have to interrupt one to return to the other when I get the edits back from the editor or the proof. I do find that I have to write one in its entirely before starting the next. I don’t have trouble with plots and characters but I do with tone. The Klondike books are intended to be comedies. The Molly Smiths are not, and I find it hard to keep things light after dealing with very serious issues, not so hard to go the other way. So what I do is find a couple of humorous books to read and that seems to help lighten my mood. 

IRTM:  One of your greatest pet peeves in mystery fiction is the author who is too much in love with his or her character. Not mentioning names, of course, what do you mean by that and how do you avoid this in your own work?

VD: A tough question. It’s something you almost can’t quite put your finger on, but somehow the character just seems to be too good and too perfect, and everyone (in the book) thinks they’re so special.  I guess the way to avoid it is to create a complex, conflicted character and have them make mistakes and not always be perfect.

IRTM: You also blogged recently about a desire to avoid crime fiction labels, i.e. "murder mysteries" vs. "cozies" vs. psychological suspense or adventure novels. Unfortunately, most agents and publishers these days almost demand that they be able to classify a manuscript in a specific category. What do you feel is lost in this rigid classification process for writers and readers?

VD: What I worry about is formula.  It’s a struggle for us as crime writers to get recognition from the literary ‘establishment’ (particularly in Canada) and the idea that a crime novel must follow a formula doesn’t help. So many good books overlap sub-genres that if you are classifying a book by its subgenre, readers of other sub-genres might not even find that book that they might well love. Also what happens if books get mis-classified or one person interprets a sub-genre as meaning something different than what other people interpret it as? Where this came about is that someone in an organization I belong to thought police procedural means extensive forensics (like CSI or Kath Reichs) and mis-categorized my books very badly.

IRTM: Your next book in the Constable Molly Smith book, the fifth, is titled Among the Departed and deals with a reopened police investigation into a man's disappearance, and how the lives of the missing man's wife and two children were destroyed by the case. How do you see Smith and your other characters evolving over time?

VD: As far as I know Molly Smith is unique in police procedurals as she is young and green and very naïve. She is on probation in the first two books. I did that because first of all I want to explore issues of growing up as a young woman today (I have three daughters in that age group). For example in Negative Image her boyfriend, who is also a cop, is so over-protective she worries about what would happen if they were in a situation together. I want to have lots of opportunity to have her grow as a woman and as a police officer. So I see Molly changing a lot over the course of the series. John Winters, not so much, he’s been a cop for almost thirty years and is pretty much set in his ways. Although I do hope that he and Lucky Smith, Molly’s hippie mother, learn from each other, and each have some of their prejudices reduced. Lucky, by the way, is in for some big changes.

Vicki's book Negative Image, published by Poison Pen Press, is due in stores this week, and you can also catch her postings on the crime fiction blog Type M for Murder.

Noir at a Discount

 

The e-book anthology Discount Noir goes on sale today. Edited by Patricia Abbott and Steve Weddle, it features a host of A-list authors, 42 stories total, all set in a "big box" store setting (think Wal-Mart).

The author roster includes Patricia Abbott, Sophie Littlefield, Kieran Shea, Chad Eagleton, Ed Gorman, Cormac Brown, Fleur Bradley, Alan Griffiths, Laura Benedict, Garnett Elliot, Eric Beetner, Jack Bates, Bill Crider, Loren Eaton, John DuMond, John McFetridge, Toni McGee Causey, Jeff Vande Zande, James Reasoner, Kyle Minor, Randy Rohn, Todd Mason, Byron Quertermous, Sandra Scoppettone, Stephen D. Rogers, Steve Weddle, Evan Lewis, Daniel B. O’Shea, Sandra Seamans, Albert Tucher, Donna Moore, John Weagly, Keith Rawson, Gerald So, Dave Zeltserman, Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen, Jay Stringer, Anne Frasier, Kathleen A. Ryan, Eric Peterson, Chris Grabenstein and J.T. Ellison.

Charles Ardai wrote the introduction for the book, which was borne out of a blog flash fiction challenge. It's published by Untreed Reads and is available via their store, as well as in other e-book venues, as listed on their site.

Jilliane Hoffman - Pretty Little Things

 

Jilliane Hoffman began her professional career as an Assistant State Attorney prosecuting felonies in Florida from 1992 to 1996, with special assignments to the Domestic Violence Unit and the Legal Extradition Unit. Through 2001, she was the Regional Legal Advisor for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, advising more than one hundred special agents on criminal and civil matters in complex investigations involving narcotics, homicide, and organized crime.

She turned to writing thrillers and hit the big time with her 2004 debut novel Retribution, an international bestseller that received widespread critical acclaim and is currently under development with Warner Bros. Hoffman has also appeared on various TV news shows giving her expert opinion on legal issues and high-profile cases.

Her latest book is Pretty Little Things, the story of thirteen-year-old Lainey Emerson whose disappearance is at first written off as a teenage runaway case—until Special Agent Bobby Dees, head of the Crimes Against Children Squad in Miami, finds information on the girl's computer that details a secret Internet relationship. Dees fears the girl may be the victim of an online predator, and when chilling evidence of other possible victims is sent to a Miami television station, Dees suspects Lainey may not be the only victim. The faceless monster from cyberspace, who goes by the name "El Capitan," instigates a game of cat and mouse with Dees, who is still haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his own teenage daughter. 

I asked Jilliane about the inspiration for the plot, which hit a little too close to home.

Q: As I understand it, you got the idea for this novel when your oldest daughter told you a disturbing story about a friend of hers?

That’s right. My daughter was in the fourth grade when a classmate friend of hers was approached on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) by a “boy” with a screen name of “rooster69”— the double meaning of which was lost on an eleven year old. She told him she was 16 and began an internet relationship with this “boy” and eventually shared her friend’s email and AIM account information with him. He then began to correspond with her friends, as well, who all thought the whole thing was very funny. Until this “boy” asked one of the girls to send him pictures of herself—naked. The girls did not run to their parents to tell them what had happened, though. In fact, if my daughter had not told me what the girls were talking about over lunch at school, I am not sure when, if ever, a parent would have gotten involved. And that is really scary. I contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), Crimes Against Children squad. Agents conducted an investigation and discovered the “boy” was a 43 year-old man from North Carolina.

Imagining a worst-case scenario of what might have been served as the inspiration for Pretty Little Things.   

Q: I imagine almost everyone has read about the occasional case of cyber predators in the news, but just how common is this type of crime?

Common enough to generate headlines on a consistent basis around the country. Just 3 weeks ago, on the second page of the local section in the Sun Sentinel, was an article about a 13 year-old girl who’d met a boy she’d been chatting with on MySpace at the movies. He turned out to be 20. She invited him back to her house. He snuck in through the window and raped her. And of course, not every story involves abduction, results in murder, triggers Amber Alerts, or generates national headlines. We sometimes judge how serious something is by how often we personally see it on the front page of our local paper.  Oftentimes cyber-predator crimes are underreported, because the child/teen was not abducted; rather, he/she was assaulted or molested and is embarrassed or frightened to tell an adult what happened. 

Watch Dateline’s “To Catch A Predator” to get an idea how pervasive the problem is. That’s a simple sting set up by a TV news show, and the producers have to practically usher each bad guy out the back door and into the waiting arms of the cops just to make room for the next bad guy who is already knocking on the front door. All parents should school their children on the dangers of the internet—particularly, that not everyone is who they say they are on the other side of that computer screen.

Q: Your legal background must be helpful with getting details right and also contributing a sense of realism to your writing. But do you find that background is ever a hindrance? Perhaps making you obsess over details too much or worrying you might be caught with an error?

I do obsess over details. I think you have to to get it right. I think all readers deserve realism, and characters and settings and scenes that are authentic, especially when you write genre specific novels, such as legal or medical thrillers. I didn’t go to medical school and anyone who works in the medical profession would see me for a fraud if I tried to write about life in the ER. I write about the criminal justice system, which I know like the back of my hand. I take my readers through that system that I worked in, through the court hearings and into the holding cells and the Formica cubicles of the State Attorney’s Office, and it is those seemingly mundane details that readers most appreciate, because it makes them feel as if they are walking through that courtroom or standing in the secretarial pool. And if I do write about something outside of my field of knowledge, such as in my third novel, Plea of Insanity, where I wrote about a character suffering from schizophrenia, I research the subject until I feel as comfortable talking about it as I would talking about tort law. I personally cannot stand to read a book where the author didn’t do his or her homework. Once I catch on to that, I put the book down, no matter where I am in it. 

Q: You've said that you didn't set out to be a writer, and after tedious college papers and legal briefs, you weren't exactly thinking about writing as a career or hobby. What changed your mind and direction?

I was prosecuting a violent serial rapist and I got a crazy thought when my victim was on the stand: “What if a victim had an opportunity to prosecute her offender? Would she choose justice, like she was taught in law school, or would it be retribution?” From there, that tagline grew into a storyline with characters and arms and legs and subplots, until it had finally developed into a full-grown novel in my head, just itching to come out. So I quit my job and put it down on paper. That was my first novel, Retribution. 

Q: As a prosecutor, you came in contact with sociopaths and other less-than-savory people, which must help with developing characters in your books. Are there any areas left where you find you still have to conduct research to help with  characterization, setting or technical points?

I always conduct research, particularly with character development. Because not every sociopath is the same as the one before, and mental conditions do not come in a one-size-fits all description. I always call on my special agent friends with FDLE to help me with the finer points of “cop-stuff”, (such as, weird enough, how they take off their gun belts at night). Because as I said above, it is all about realism, and if I describe something wrong, even if one reader out of a thousand spots it, I will lose that reader. It’s just not worth it, when I can do the research and make it right.  

Q: The Guardian newspaper said that you were "guaranteed to follow in the best-selling footsteps of (Patricia) Cornwell, (Kathy) Reichs and (Karin) Slaughter." That's a huge compliment! Do you have any writing mentors or authors who have been a particular inspiration?

That was quite a compliment! I love Nelson DeMille—he is the first author that I actually read by author. I had finished The Gold Coast, loved it and went back and read everything he had written.  One of my personal favorite authors is Thomas Harris, who wrote Silence of the Lambs, because he can scare the hell out of me, which is not an easy task. As for other authors I read, I like James Patterson because he makes the pages fly by, and I like John Grisham, because he can make even corporate law sound exciting!

Q: Tell me about the inspiration for the protagonist in Pretty Little Things. Bobby Dees is called "The Shepherd," due to his track record in finding missing children, even though he hates that title. Is he based on anyone you know?

Bobby Dees is a combination of people I have met and worked with over the years. Crimes Against Children Agentsand detectives that work missing children cases and child sexual battery cases are a special lot. They have a particularly high burnout rate and a certain dark cynicism about them. They have seen things that no one should see in this world and then they have to go back to work the next day and see more of it. Investigating the scum of society that commit heinous crimes against innocent children has its rewards, but it also can break down even the biggest and baddest detective.

Q: Your next novel is going to be the third in a trilogy (following Retribution and Last Witness) featuring C.J. Townsend, an over-worked, underpaid prosecutor. How much of you is in C.J.?

I can relate to C.J.; I share her prosecutorial zeal for justice and her idealism and, at times, her bitter disappointment in a system that doesn’t always work.

Q: Will we be seeing more of Special Agent Bobby Dees in the future?

All four of my novels share some continuing characters and Miami as their setting. I did that on purpose, because I always figured it might be fun to work characters from different novels together in a fresh storyline. So, yes, you may very well see Bobby Dees again. Maybe I’ll partner him with John Latarrino or Dom Falconetti or Manny Alvarez.

 

For more information on Jilliane, the book and her upcoming events, check out her web site. There's also a link where you can download the first two chapters of Pretty Little Things.

Two Times Crime

Coming up beginning October 22nd are two terrific events for fans of crime fiction, especially if you happen to live in a more northerly latitude. As reported on the Women of Mystery blog, the inaugural Astoria/LIC International Film Festival will take place in the New York area, with a variety of events. Although not specifically devoted just to noir or crime-themed books, plays and movies, there are several such offerings included, such as Saturday's readings by members of the New York/Tri-State Sisters in Crime chapter at The Secret Theatre in Queens. Terrie Farley Moran, Laura Joh Rowland, Lina Zeldovich, Elizabeth Zelvin, Cathi Stoler, Kenneth Wishnia and Peggy Ehrhart will all be on hand.,

Even farther up north, the International Festival of Authors in Toronto includes the IFOA Noir event, starting off with an interview/reading featuring R.J. Ellory and Jeff Lindsay and including other bestselling authors such as Louise Penny and Peter Robinson. Ahead of the festival, the Toronto Star online asked each of the participants to detail "what led them to a life of crime" (writing, that is). I love Don Winslow's comment, "People sometimes ask me if, as a crime genre writer, I live in a 'literary ghetto.' My response is, 'Yes, and I love my neighbourhood.'"

In Reference to Blogs

 

I'm forever grateful for all of the crime fiction bloggers out there who work tirelessly to promote the genre, authors, reading, etc., but since since part of the raison d'etre of this particular blog is to provide reference materials for writers and readers of crime fiction, I thought I'd point out a few blogs that are especially helpful with "insider" information:

Lee Lofland is a veteran police investigator and author himself, whose Graveyard Shift blog is a wonderful resource for topics like police procedures and death investigation. Lee is also the organizer of the Writers' Police Academy which was just held in North Carolina.

Author Terry O'Dell was a participant in the recent Academy, and wrote up her experiences in four parts (Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four). Hopefully, Lee will be holding another of these events next year, so keep an eye out for dates and registration info on Lee's site.

D.P. Lyle is a doctor of cardiology and a consultant to authors and TV shows about getting medical details and forensic right in your stories. His Writer's Forensics Blog is a wealth of information, and if you want to learn more about corpse identification, DNA, poisons and drugs, you should start there.

Guns, Gams and Gumshoes is a terrific blog if you're writing private eye fiction. It's the brainchild of authors and P.I.'s Colleen Collins and Shaun Kaufman. 

Mark Young is also a former law enforcement officer (and ex-Marine) who turned his hand to writing. His Hook 'Em and Book 'Em blog has a variety of crime-related topics, such as his recent two-part look into terrorism with Fred Burton, a former counterterrorism agent.

The Women in Crime Ink blog features authors who are also attorneys, officers, and forensics experts. As you might imagine with that variety of backgrounds, the topics are also varied, including this week's post with Michael Street, the "Sketch Cop."

Stephen Jay Schwartz is "Beat"

 

Bestselling author Stephen Jay Schwartz spent a number of years as the Director of Development for film director Wolfgang Petersen (whose credits include Das Boot, In the Line of Fire, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm) where he worked with writers, producers and studio executives to develop screenplays for production. Stephen's own film work has exhibited at the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival, the Directors Guild of America, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California.

Schwartz's debut novel Boulevard introduced his protagonist, the gifted LAPD robbery and homicide detective Hayden Glass, who also happens to be a sex addict and goes to 12-step meetings for his addiction. The follow-up novel is Beat, in which Glass, who suffers from a deep desire to connect with anyone, seeks refuge in the seedy world of strip-clubs, prostitution, and Internet pornography. He becomes obsessed with Cora, a web-cam vixen and prostitute operating out of San Francisco. While on leave from the LAPD, Glass soon finds himself making weekly trips north in attempts to save Cora from herself, but his quest leads him to a massive sex slave trade run by the Russian mafia and protected by a group of powerful and corrupt San Francisco cops. 

Stephen took time out of his busy book promotion schedule to do a little e-mail back and forth chatting with "In Reference to Murder":

Q: The wonderfully talented author Michael Connelly said that "just when I thought there wasn't an original take left on the detective novel, along comes Stephen Jay Schwartz and [Hayden Glass]." How did you decide to feature such a complex and tortured hero, a sex addict, as your protagonist?

Hayden’s journey really stems from my own struggles with sex addiction, which existed as a shameful secret for far too many years of my life.  I didn’t know that my compulsive behavior was actually an addiction until a counselor suggested that I go to a Twelve-Step meeting.  There I learned what was behind my actions and I was given a chance to heal and change.  As I began to consider the topic for my first novel, I thought about my history and I realized that if I had read a popular novel about a protagonist who struggled with his sex addiction (as opposed to the typical cop-alcoholic) I would have recognized myself in the pages, and I might have found help sooner.  That’s when I realized that I should dig deep into myself to present a painfully flawed and unique character who, despite his transgressions, really wants to be good.  He goes to the meetings, he has a sponsor, he struggles for sobriety.  But he’s human, and when the world comes crushing down on him, he buckles.  I believe that we are all frail creatures, and that most of us want to do good.  But life has a way of beating us down and sometimes we react by lashing out to hurt others, and sometimes we react by turning inward to torture ourselves.  Most addicts are incredibly sensitive people who’d rather hurt themselves.  It’s interesting to note that Hayden Glass does not hurt women – he uses women to hurt himself.

Q:  I was interested to read a posting you wrote about how deeply you immerse yourself in research (a/k/a "going native"). For Beat, you spent time embedded with members of the San Francisco Police Department, rode with narcotics officers and patrol officers, interviewed captains and city councilmen and went on vice calls and foot patrol. What was that experience like?

Man, I love research.  Sometimes I think I’m a writer as an excuse to do the research.  With BEAT I started by meeting a San Francisco patrol officer who worked the North Beach beat.  We hit it off, and he brought me into the Central Police Station to meet his sergeant, lieutenant, and all the other patrol officers.  Before long I was interviewing police captains and doing ride-alongs.  Soon I noticed that the residents and business people in North Beach were treating me as an undercover cop.  I noticed that I was getting special treatment at the cafes and restaurants.  And I heard a few “Serpico” comments along the way.  And, seriously, if I weren’t a writer I’d want to be a San Francisco police officer working the North Beach beat.  It’s community policing at its best.  By “imbedding” myself with the officers I was privy to their world, as seen by the people who work the streets every day.  I came away with almost a hundred pages of single-spaced, typed notes detailing every aspect of their jobs, with particular emphasis placed on the unique nomenclature used by the SFPD.  It’s hard to get this kind of detail from doing only book research.  And it’s fun.  Research is kind-of like method acting—I get the opportunity to live in their shoes, to fill my world with their experiences, until those experiences are mine.  Then, as I write, I reach into that vast storage space to pull “memories” and “experiences” to enrich my characters.  I got so lost in the research for BEAT that I almost forgot to write the book.

Q: You've also said that when you tell people you're a writer, they'll tell you the most amazing things, since everyone wants to be remembered. What is one of the most unexpected or outrageous tales you've encountered from these "confessionals" and did you end up using it your writing?

Being a writer is like being a bartender.  People need to be heard, they want someone to hear their story.  And everyone has a story to tell.  I can understand how you’d tell your innermost thoughts to a bartender, who most likely won’t even remember it the next time you meet.  But to tell that story to a writer?  It tells me that people really need to be heard.  San Francisco is a city filled with scandal.  The policemen, the city council members, the folks on the street—everyone has a vibrant point of view.  I’ve heard some high-ranking people tell me stories that I’d never repeat, and yet they seemed to be giving me permission to use the information anyway I see fit.  And I realize that I don’t really need to use the stories per se, because the knowledge they impart tends to influence the background of my character’s world.  If I hear a story about how the Chief of Police ruined the career of an up-and-coming officer I can take that idea and weave it into my story as motivation for why a particular policeman bends the rules.  He might fear the repercussions that could come if he reports an incident as it actually happened.  These stories, these “confessionals,” help me design a realistic environment for my characters to inhabit. 

That said, I did hear many great stories and I used as many as possible in the book.  A lot of them add levity to what would otherwise be a very dark journey into the bowels of San Francisco’s underworld.

 Q: On Murderati, you posted photos of your "office" — a writing cafe — and said that you can only write in cafes, because your home or the library is too quiet. Other than spending a certain portion of your advance on lattes, how do you think such an environment inspires your work and why is silence such a barrier?

Yes, I titled that blog post “Too Lonely to Write Alone.”  As writers we spend so much time in our heads.  It can be maddening.  My solution is to take that lonely world out into the public.  The café experience is the only way I know how to write.  I need to see people, living their lives, having fun, engaged in conversation.  It reminds me that the world exists beyond my own little story, and it helps me capture the nuance of human interaction in words.  Also, there’s a point in my writing day where I hit the wall.  It helps to look up from my computer screen to see other writers, friends of mine, hard at work, or drifting off because they’ve hit the wall themselves.  That’s my cue to stand up, grab another coffee and engage.  It gives me the opportunity to talk with other writers, to discuss their project or mine, to go on about the news or weather or politics.  It gets me out of my head for a while.  Then, when guilt grabs me by the throat, I step back to my table and tackle my story with fresh eyes.

 Q: Some of your favorite literary authors (who also spent their days in Parisian cafes) are Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin. What influence, if any, do they have on what you write, and are there any crime fiction mentors who inspire you, or would you say you're more influenced by your film background?

Lots and lots of influences on my writing.  Music is a huge contributor, since I began studying music in the fourth grade.  I started on clarinet then moved to saxophone in high school.  I spent my first college year as a Jazz Studies major at the renowned music school at NTSU.  To me, a sentence is a musical line.  The consonants and vowels create syncopation and staccato or legato and pianissimo.  I read my sentences out loud as I write them to make sure they sound right to my ear.  When I heard Jack Kerouac reading his work I realized that he had fused music with writing.  He reads his work like Charlie Parker plays “Donna Lee.”  And his sentences are written for his specific performance.  You should really listen to Kerouac reading “On the Road,” accompanied by Steve Allen on piano.  It opened my eyes.  And so I tend to lean towards writers who have this sense of musicality and who are playful with words on the page.  People like James Joyce, who is unsurpassed in his ability to mimic sounds with words.  Or Gertrude Stein, who uses alliteration to emphasize her statements.  I seem to be drawn to American authors of the Twentieth Century – Steinbeck, Hemmingway, Katherine Ann Porter, Flannery O’Connor.  But I’ve been influenced as well by a number of modern writers like Chuck Palahniuk, Jhumpa Lahiri, John Updike, Charles Bukowski and Jim Thompson.  Thompson’s work is amazing – lean, efficient, shocking.  I read about eighteen of his novels as I was writing BOULEVARD.  I learned to tighten and cut by studying his work.  I’ve also fallen in love with the works of Elmore Leonard.  There are so many crime writers I’ve yet to read, since I really didn’t discover the genre, or my passion for the genre, until a few years ago.  And, of course, now that I’ve found them, there’s simply no more time to read…

 Q: As part of your movie/documentary past, you wrote "Inside the Space Station" for the Discovery Channel. As a big of a space-nut myself, I was wondering if you have any science or astronomy in your background? Even if not, perhaps we'll be seeing a Stephen Jay Schwartz astronaut detective one of these days...

An astronaut-detective sounds intriguing.  You’ve got me thinking now.

However, I earned a C in my college astronomy class—perhaps because my classmate, author Brett Battles, didn’t let me cheat off his tests.

I do love space.  I love reading Scientific American and all the science magazines.  When I had more time to read I was checking out String Theory and the Theory of Relativity.  It’s all fascinating stuff, but requires more mental attention than I have to spare.  I’ve gained a greater appreciation for science as I’ve grown older.  I would love to take a trip to space one day, just to get the feel of zero grav and see the contours of our planet from above.

I did a ton of research for that Discovery Channel project.  I really had to come up to speed quickly, just to have a conversation with anyone at NASA.  Once I could hold up my end of the conversation, I was talking to astronauts, cosmonauts, program managers and scientists from around the world.  I went to Edwards Air Force base where we shot the drop of an X-38 emergency landing vessel from a B-52 bomber.  The X38 was designed to take six astronauts back to Earth in the event of a disaster on the International Space Station.  I learned so much and I’d love to put this knowledge to use in a story or screenplay someday.  I combined forces with a film director friend of mine once and we wrote a detailed treatment for a film about one man’s journey to a planet, where he is forced to make a crash landing.  We pitched it as “Cast Away” in space.  It was a really great concept, filled with surprises that could only come from outer space.  Hopefully the project will be resurrected some day.

 Q: What other literary projects do you have in the pipeline?

Well, I’ve got a “Hayden” short story that will publish on Kindle for free soon, something my editor suggested I do to introduce new readers to the world of Hayden Glass.  I take us back to Hayden’s first year in the LAPD, when he’s doing a stint in Vice.  It documents the moment he “crosses the line,” after he picks up a prostitute and fails to arrest her.  It marks the beginning of his addictive behavior.  It was fun to write a short story, to know that I could capture an element of his world in 7,000 words.

I’m doing research now for my third novel, which is a standalone.  The protagonist is a young FBI agent who gets in over his head chasing a hit-man through Europe.  The hero is an everyman, someone who hasn’t yet considered the vastness of the world, hasn’t been forced to make the really tough decisions in life.  He’ll face them in this book.

After that, I’d like to do a third Hayden book, perhaps placing him in the San Fernando Valley, the porn capital of the United States.  I think that just might offer a little challenge to his sobriety.

 

Beat was released September 28th and is now available in stores. You can also check out Stephen's web site linked above and his blog posts over at Murderati.

Mark Twain, Crime Fiction Author

 

Mark Twain was born in 1835 and died in 1910, making 2010 both the 175th anniversary of his birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. There have been special events throughout the year, including an exhibit currently at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, titled "Mark Twain: A Skeptic's Progress," which has handwritten manuscripts and typescripts of works by Twain, his letters and correspondence, drawings and illustration mock-ups for printed editions, photographs, and several three-dimensional artifacts.

Twain turned his considerable satirical talents on all manner of subject material during his career, including detective fiction, which had gotten a boost from the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, (whose first appearance in publication was in 1887). In 1996, Oxford University Press bundled several of Twain's crime fiction parodies into one volume, The Stolen White Elephant and Other Detective Stories, with a foreward by Walter Mosley. The collection includes several short stories and two novellas, "Tom Sawyer, Detective," in which Twain's most popular creation tries to solve a mysterious murder and "A Double Barrelled Detective Story" that transports Sherlock Holmes to the American wild west and sees his famous logic bested by a young amateur detective who relies on supernatural sense of smell.

As you might expect, Twain wasn't a huge fan of the detective fiction of the day, once saying, "What a curious thing a 'detective' story is. And was there ever one that the author needn't be ashamed of, except the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue'?" One wonders what he would have made of the likes of Donald E. Westlake, Carl Hiaasen and Donna Andrews. . .

Festival Fare

 

It's fall festival time again. This month, Centuries and Sleuths bookstore turns 20, and to celebrate, they've scheduled over 42 authors on various panels. Coming up on September 11 are Libby Fischer Hellmann, Stephanie Kuehnert, William Kent Krueger, Shane Gericke and Tony Perona, with more panels on September 18, 19, 25 and 26.

Across the Pond the Reading Festival of Crime Writing is holding its third event September 16-19 featuring the likes of Val McDermid, Christopher Brookmyre, Lindsey Davis, Paul Doherty, Nicci French, Sophie Hannah and Andrew Taylor.

The George Mason University Fall for the Book in Fairfax, Virginia, is coming up September 19-25. The lineup includes the mother-and-son mystery team Charles and Caroline Todd, as well as crime fiction authors Megan Abbott and Ellen Crosby.

It's also time for the annual Library of Congress National Book Festival held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Stop by the fiction and mystery booths on September 25th and catch readings and signings by Ken Follett, Martha Grimes, Karin Slaughter and Scott Turow.

The Mystery, Suspense and Thriller Pavilion at the West Hollywood Book Fair in California has six back-to-back panels on September 26th with a stellar group of authors.

And not so much a festival as a writers' conference, the Writers' Police Academy offers a great opportunity for crime fiction writers to get hands-on experience with police investigation and forensics, as well as hear from such notable speakers as Jeffery Deaver.

Last Chance for Summer Festivals

 

Summers always speed along way too quickly, but here we are in August already, the days getting gradually shorter and even the sounds of crickets fading one by one. At least there's still the occasional firefly, although I fear those poor desperately-hovering fellows may have missed their chance. Fortunately, fans of crime fiction still have a chance to catch some nifty conferences and festivals coming up this month. Take a look:

August 13-14, 2010
St. Hilda's Crime & Mystery Weekend
Oxford, England
Guest of Honour is Simon Brett; Conference Chair is Andrew Taylor; Colin Dexter featured speaker; other authors include Ann Cleeves, Natasha Cooper, Kate Ellis, Penelope Evans, Anthea Fraser, Sophie Hannah, David Hewson, Joanna Hines, Gillian Linscott (aka Caro Peacock), Peter Lovesey and Anne Perry. There will also be a Tribute to PD James to honour her 90th birthday on Saturday.

August 14, 2010
Scene of the Crime Mystery Writing Festival
Wolfe Island, Ontario, Canada
Special Guests: Michael Blair, Vicki Delany, Susanna Kearsley, James W. Nichol, and Grant Allen Award honoree Gail Bowen.

August 14-30, 2010
Edinburgh International Book Festival
Edinburgh, Scotland
Crime-related literary events include talks, panels and workshops led by Tess Gerritsen, Lin Anderson, Aline Templeton, Caroline Dunford, Reggie Nadelson, Ian Rankin, Reginald Hill, Denise Hill, Declan Hughes, Jasper Fforde, Alexander McCall Smith and many more.

August 20-22, 2010
Killer Nashville
Nashville, TN
Guest of Honor: Jeffery Deaver, with many other authors, publishers, editors, agents and forensics experts, as well as 40 panels and discussions.

A Look at a Vook Book

  Jeffrey Deaver and 21 other best-selling thriller authors are collaborating with Vook, a company that has been at the forefront of integrating text and video. The result is Watchlist, a two-part vook series with 34 chapters, each written  by a different author, combined with 26 original videos and a manuscript reading by actor Alfred Molina. There are many experts in the biz who think this is the wave of the future in book publishing, a digital mixed-bag of video, text, images and social media combined into the adult version of a "pop up" book.

Whether the average person takes to this form of information overload in their reading experience remains to be seen; perhaps it will be another generational divide, with those under 40ish appreciating it a bit more than their elders. Or not. Personally, I think this type of multimedia format is ideal for nonfiction works, especially references and textbooks, but since fiction is where I can let my own imagination re-create the world the author has set in motion, I'm not sure the intrusion of someone else's concept will be something I embrace. That's what movie adaptations are for, n'est-ce pas? Fortunately, for us old fogies, there's a print version of the book by Vanguard Press.

Karin Slaughter Definitely Isn't "Broken"

 

Author Karin Slaughter took the standard schooling route, including college at Georgia State University, where she studied Renaissance poetry. Then, things got a little more interesting — in a standing-out-on-a-limb sort of way. She dropped out with just two classes left before graduation to work exclusively on her start-up sign company. But when the urge to write got so intense, she sold the sign company and turned to writing full-time. The result? Since 2001, which is when her first published novel,  Blindsighted, was released (the first title in the Grant County series, shortlisted for the Barry,  Macavity, and Dagger Debut Awards), she has been on several bestseller lists and sold 17 million books in 30 different languages.

The Grant County series is set in the fictional Georgia town of Heartsdale and features Dr. Sara Linton, the town’s pediatrician and part-time medical examiner; her ex-husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, the county’s police chief, (who took a controversial exit from the series in Beyond Reach); and Detective Lena Adams, who has a perennial chip on her shoulder. Slaughter also writes a series with Will Trent and Faith Mitchell, special agents for the George Bureau of Investigation in Atlanta. She merged the two series, first in 2009's Undone and again in her latest novel out this month, Broken.

Broken focuses on Special Agent Will Trent who arrives in Grant County and finds a police department determined to protect its own and far too many unanswered questions about a prisoner’s death. He doesn’t understand why Officer Lena Adams is hiding secrets from him or her role in the death of Grant County’s popular police chief. He doesn’t know why the chief's widow, Dr. Sara Linton, needs him now more than ever to help her crack this case.

Karin Slaughter is on a whirlwind tour, both online and "off," and took some time to answer a few questions for In Reference to Murder.

IRTM:  Before you started writing thrillers, you owned a sign company—but then you sold it so you could start writing. You've said it was important for you to cut that safety net of a steady job and paycheck. Most "experts" advise writers to not quit their day jobs. Was this a difficult or smooth transition for you?

KS:  The transition was actually pretty smooth because I had a lot of things going for me: I already had an agent.  I’d already written a book.  I had money saved up so that I wouldn’t starve.  So, it was a calculated risk, but it was still a risk.  I think each writer has to make the decision of when to go it alone, if ever.  I’ve got a risk-taking personality, so it worked for me.  For someone else, it might make them turn to the bottle or hide under the bed, neither of which is conducive to good writing.

IRTM: You've likened book writing to a "short but passionate love affair." So how do you keep the passion alive in that love affair, book after book?

KS: I try to tell something new about the characters in each new book.  I also have a lot of secrets about my characters that I don’t always share with my readers.  In Broken, for instance, we learn some new things about Lena Adams, whom I’ve been writing about for over ten years.  I’ve always felt very strongly that if you don’t have anything interesting to say, you shouldn’t say it, so a lot of times when I’m plotting out the books, I’ll deliberately throw obstacles in the way of characters so that their personalities have to change.  Lena has certainly benefited (if I can use that word) from this over the years.

IRTM: You are proud (and rightly so) of being a southern writer and get annoyed with stereotypes toward southerners. (I'm from Tennessee and when I traveled to New York City once, had a cabbie ask in all seriousness why I was wearing shoes and did I have a moonshine still in my backyard.) Do you feel you're educating those stereotype-holders through your writing in some way?

KS: I hope I am, but let’s face it: New Yorkers tend to have their heads up their butts, as we say Southerners like to say.  If you hired a hundred people to walk around Midtown in red shirts, all the newspapers and all the news shows would have stories the next day about how everybody in America has started wearing red shirts.  They think what they see outside their window translates to the rest of the world, when really, the city is extremely segregated (especially in the publishing business), extremely antiquated and very hard to live in unless you’ve got a lot of money. That’s not the America I know, but that’s who represents us to the world. I’m glad to do my part in disabusing readers of those notions.

IRTM: You killed off a major character in your Grant County series and got hate mail for it. Yet you say while killing off Jeffrey was one of the hardest things you've ever done, you think it was the best thing for the series. (For the record, one review I read of Broken said that, "although the Jeffrey is certainly missed, this book proves the series can move forward without his presence." So there.)  Can you explain a little more about that "best thing for the series" idea?

KS: When I talk about the “best thing for the series” what I mean is the best thing for me as a writer.  Let’s face it: it would’ve been very easy for me to write the same stories over and over again.  That’s the basis of a lot of crime series, and while I have no problem with that, in my own work I was afraid I would get stale.  One of the things readers (hopefully!) like about my books is that I’m telling fast-paced, emotionally gripping stories.  I think the fact that folks had such an extreme reaction to Jeffrey’s death means that it resonated for them, and that I did a good job of developing him as a character.  But, it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t contrived to sell more books (generally, authors don’t equate hate-mail with increasing sales).  It was organic to the story, and it gave me an opportunity to pull Sara into a new and different world.  Also, in Broken, it gave me the opportunity to show Lena without Jeffrey’s influence, which was very interesting.

IRTM: You write detailed and believable characters, both men and women, and also from both male and female POV's. Do you find it's harder to write men or to write women characters?

KS: Men are actually easier for me because women think in a much more visceral way.  For instance, when I read Lee Child and Reacher comes upon a body, it’s going to be very mechanical in the telling. “Here’s the knife.  Here’s the blood.  Here’s the body.”  If I read something by Tess Gerritsen, it’s going to be, “This is the smell in the air.  This is the taste.  This is how the victim looks.  This is probably what the victim was thinking when he or she died.”  I’m not saying either approach is right or wrong, and thank God they’re different because these are two authors I love reading.  I’m just saying it’s different, and when I’m writing Will I am conscious of that.

IRTM: In that same vein, I like what you once said about the great thing about being a man is if you get mad at someone, you can kick their ass, but women have to spread rumors and give them nasty glances in the hallway. Also, you get complaints about your female characters cussing but not your male characters. How do you deal with and/or get around these gender traits and
biases in writing?

KS: Well, the new thing I’ve been getting is, “you write like a man,” which I suppose is a way of saying that I am a good writer, because women only write chick lit and knitting mysteries where Amish cats solve the crime.  I once heard Carol Shields interviewed wherein she said that anytime a man writes something, it’s considered more valid.  I recall thinking, “crap, and she won the Pulitzer.”  It’s hard out in crimeland if you’re a female author writing about what some view as “male” themes, but here is the interesting dichotomy: over 85% of all books are purchased by women.  One look at the bestseller lists tells you that the majority of books being bought are crime fiction, and not just crime but realistic crime of the sort I write.  Now, what does that tell you about women?  Obviously, we are interested in these stories.  It follows that we would start writing about them.

IRTM:  It's been said that your heroes are extremely flawed and messed up, but still ultimately likable. Do you find yourself putting qualities in characters that are part of you, or rather traits you wish you had, or do you even consciously think about those types of parallels?

KS: I’m sure some of my characteristics show up in the characters without me thinking about it.  I think one thing about most if not all of them—even the bad guys—is that they have very good manners.  Maybe that comes from me being southern, or maybe it’s just because I know that there is no such thing as a 100% bad or 100% good person.  We all have strengths and flaws. But, you know, as a child I always went to church with my grandmother, and after the services she’d introduce me to her friends, and as soon as the friend turned her back, my grandmother would tell me this dark secret about her.  “You know her husband drinks,” or “You know she came home from church last week and found her son trying on her underwear.”  I love that sort of thing.  It’s those little peccadilloes that make us interesting.  Some more than others, of course!

IRTM: You knew for years that Jeffrey was going to die but didn’t give a lot of thought to what would come after. Following that event, you combined the Grant County series with the Will Trent/Atlanta series in Undone and now again in Broken. When did you decide to blend the two series as the next progression in Sara's life after her husband's death?

KS: I couldn’t think about what would come after because I knew I would never be able to write the lead-up to the tragedy.  It was very hard touring for a few years because I am basically an honest person, and I had to lie to folks about Jeffrey and to some degree Sara.  Even though they are fictional characters and I get paid to make things up for a living, I had a hard time with that.  I knew when I wrote Triptych, the first book with Will, that he would end up meeting Sara and Lena.  So, I laid a lot of groundwork into putting together his character and making sure that he wasn’t just a carbon copy of Jeffrey, because what’s the point if I just throw in a guy who is exactly like Jeffrey?  Will lacks the self-confidence and sexual prowess that made Jeffrey who he was.  He’s not the kind of guy who wants to be the center of attention.  He’s a team player and doesn’t want the spotlight.  A lot of this comes from his dyslexia.  When you have a secret that big to hide, you avoid scrutiny at all costs.

IRTM: You feel it's import to be realistic without moving into sensationalism regarding the violence in your novels, something a lot of crime fiction authors deal with. How difficult is it to find such a balance?

KS: I don’t find it difficult to find a balance at all because I have one rule for both the scenes of sex and the scenes of violence in my work: if I can take out that scene and it doesn’t change anything in the book, then it doesn’t belong there.  I think what I get nailed on is that I am writing so frankly about these topics and I am a woman.  Not that I’m complaining too much, because of course it gets me a lot of media attention, but I’ve never written a story where a serial killer inserts a snake into a woman’s private areas, and I’ve never had a victim who was burned alive by a broken steam pipe so that the skin peeled off, but James Patterson and Jeffrey Deaver have, yet you don’t see stories about them mentioning these things.

IRTM:  Your books are described as being quite dark—has writing the novels changed the way you look at the world, made you more pessimistic about the human species (or our chances of surviving into the next century)?

KS: Believe it or not, I’ve got a fairly laid-back outlook on the world.  I think most crime writers do.  We get our angst out on the page, then we go along with our lives in the normal way.  I really don’t think of my books as dark.  There’s a psychological component that makes you feel connected to the characters and stories in a deeper way, but all good books should do that.  And, let’s face it—at the end of the day, the bad guys are caught and our heroes go on to fight another day.  You can’t get a more positive outcome than that!

IRTM:  You're a stickler for research, but have said you still make up a great deal of things since you're not writing textbooks, and that it's important to know the rules so you can break them in a way that keeps it realistic. Are there any rules that aren't made to be broken (or that you won’t break)?

KS: I have learned the hard way that you’ve got to get every single gun detail correct or people will absolutely jump on you with both feet.  They will call you names and accuse you of all types of mental disabilities.  They have no problem believing this one small Georgia town has been the stomping grounds of a serial rapist, a child porn ring, a serial killer and various murderers and bad folks, but get a gun fact wrong and their suspension of disbelief is very unwilling indeed!

IRTM:  I believe your next book (or an upcoming book) is set in the future and titled The Recidivists. Can you tell us more about that?

KS: The Recidivists is a graphic novel project I’ve been working on for a few years now.  It’s not ready for the presses as I have to write my regular books in between, but it’s in the pipeline.  The next book is tentatively titled FALLEN, and it opens with Faith coming home to some bad stuff and having to kick some butt.  I love it!

IRTM:  I'm jealous you had a chance to try out weightlessness in the zero-G Vomit Comet. And you have plans to enter sub-orbital space via Virgin Galactic's space program? Have you already pre-booked a flight? Can I come with?

KS: The Zero-G thing was a fabulously fun time, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what it’s like to be weightless for a few seconds at a time.  I’m ready to go on Virgin Galactic, but they’ve had some set-backs.  I promised my dad I wouldn’t fly until at least 100 people have gone before me.  The ship carries six people at a time, so that might be sooner than my dad thinks!

IRTM: Is Gimme Goobers going on tour?  

KS: Lookit, send us some plane tickets and we’ll be there.  We are all about the road.

Karin will be appearing at Houston's Murder by the Book store tonight (Tuesday, June 29th) at 6:30 to sign and discuss Broken. MBTB will donate a percentage of the sales to The Women's Home, whose mission is to help women in crisis regain their self-esteem and dignity.