The Lineup - So Dark For April

When most people think of poetry, they probably call up images of love sonnets, lonely clouds or maybe the shores of Gitchie Gumee. Crime, blood, gore, death, revenge? Not so much. Then what in the world is going on with the new poetry anthology The Lineup 4: Poems on Crime?

Editor Gerald So explains that "We hope this encourages poets and writers who discover—as I have—there are some moments, some images, poetry captures much better than prose." Even when those moments and images are down these mean streets where a man must go (Raymond Chandler) because the blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it (Sylvia Plath).

After reading The Lineup, I can't possibly pick a favorite from the lot, because I've always been fond of both apples and oranges. But, being surrounded by daily news reports of war and unrest and a seemingly never-ending casualty-count coming out of Afghanistan, I was naturally struck by a contribution from Reed Farrel Coleman (who also served as a co-editor and wrote the introduction to the anthology). Titled "Slider, Part 7," it was inspired by the Babi Yar massacre outside Kiev during World War II. An excerpt goes thusly:

None prayed that he could hear.
Mostly they were silent.
Then the
pop pop pop pop pop
of the Lugers and Walthers
and with each bullet
the metal metamorphosis of human beings
into falling lumps of meat.
Then the quicklime
the dirt
more bullets
more bodies
more quicklime.
Layers and layers
like a trifle.

There are many more compact gems included in the anthology: "a mother / shakes on scabbed knees for her son / thrown in a river" (Kieran Shea); "as if the world were on the wagon / and we were practicing / a sober walk test for cops / who were bored" (Thomas Michael McDade); "Blood spreads, pools, shimmers, / Like taillights in the rain" (Steve Weddle). Plenty of powerful images, powerful words, words painting landscapes from nightmares we live, dream and remember. Check them out for yourself, and also read the entries in the other lineup, the month-long blog tour Gerald So arranged to celebrate the book's publication.

Here's an idea: today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, part of National Poetry Month. You can purchase a download of the eBook version of Lineup4 and print out your favorite poem to carry around in your pocket. Share it with a co-worker, a friend, a family member or that guy in rumpled clothes who's always sitting on the park bench giving the squirrels the evil eye. But don't be surprised if he starts quoting poetry back at you, poems he's memorized or maybe poems from his experiences. Because human nature hasn't changed all that much since 400 BCE when Plato wrote "Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history," knowing that every life becomes a poem in its own way.
 
And if the book inspires you, as it surely must, consider contributing your own offering to the next volume, accepting submissions through July 31st.

Researching The Beloved Dead

  Tony Hays is the author of an historical series based on the Arthurian legends and featuring Malgwyn ap Cuneglas, a hardened soldier who lost his sword arm fighting alongside Arthur in battle against the Saxons in the mid-5th century AD.

Tony's background doesn't seem likely fodder for such a series: raised on a Tennessee farm; spending time first as a university administrator and then serving on the State Department-sponsored Overseas Security Advisory Council; even sailing on board the USS Tortuga to the Horn of Africa during its 2002-2003 deployment in preparation for the War with Iraq as an unofficial Arab linguist.

But one of Tony's passions has always been writing, which encouraged him to get an MA degree in English/Creative Writing at Texas A&M University at Commerce in 1991 and turn his hand to another passion, historical mysteries. The first two volumes in his Dark Ages series received starred reviews from Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, and Deadly Pleasures magazine named The Divine Sacrifice one of the best new mysteries of 2010.

In the just-released third installment of the series, The Beloved Dead, Tony merges a suspenseful serial killer story line with a detailed recreation of fifth-century Britain, as Arthur sends his chief advisor Malgwyn to fetch the bride-to-be for Arthur's politically-expedient marriage. Along the way, Malgwyn gets caught up in the search for a savage murderer, who sexually abuses young girls before slitting their throats. The investigator has to wonder whether the killings, which reawaken painful memories from his own past, are aimed at destabilizing Arthur's authority. Arthur's love for Malgwyn's cousin, Guinevere, only exacerbates tension between Malgwyn and the legendary king.

As a new feature of In Reference to Murder, I'll be asking authors about their approach to research while writing their novels, be it through job shadowing, burrowing into library stacks, going online, interviews, news reports, or whatever other techniques and methods they use in getting the details just right. Or whether too much research and overplanning can be deadly to a manuscript.  Since he is a writer of historical fiction, it seemed particularly fitting to ask Tony about his thoughts on research, especially while he's on a blog tour to promote The Beloved Dead.

Tony Hays:

When is too much too much?

I've in been in the historical mystery genre, for a long times it seems. But the kind of research I do isn't really the kind most scholars do. I am a novelist, an historical novelist, and that puts some pretty tough restrictions on us.

Too much, and you're pedantic. Too little and you're not taken seriously. Over the course of my writing career I have often studied that fine line between two much and two little research writing. The easy answer is to have some sort research meter that sets off an alarm. Or I have an inner gauge.

The real answer?

I have no answer. There is no cut-and-dried method for striking the right balance.  It's completely a gut call. Sometimes we're right. Sometimes we're wrong.

In my book,The Killing Way, I think I edge toward too much historical detail. But the Dark Ages is a time that we know little about. So, every detail I could drag from the historical record, and every archaeological discovery, I used, with as soft a touch as I could, brought the time to me. But by the time of The Beloved Dead, my newest entry in the century, I believe that I'm developing a seventh sense, a little twitch in my eye that says , "hold on. Do I really need that there?"

I vote for straightforward description, not a page on how a toga looked or a page on how a dress hung over a Celtic princess. If you spend more time describing how the Celtic princess looked, the nobility in the slope of her neck, you'll be in better shape, than if you had spent a week in the library studying Celtic fabrics and dying methods. Because you will have drawn the reader's attention to the character, not the trappings.

Undoubtedly, trappings and the proper geography and weapons are important. But it will be our characters that act upon that historical setting. So, as much as you research about the landscape and those "trappings," you need to know how common people lived, and breathed, and thought. Fiction, historical or otherwise, is predominantly about the people on that landscape. You can see it is about a city as in Rutherfurd's London or Sarum, but in the end you have to have people to make them special.

I'm not certain that I have enlightened you at all. The post was supposed to deal with when is too much too much. The bottom line is that writers have to make those choices for themselves, but it is an evolving process. You won't get it right, necessarily the first, second or third time out, but you will grow as an author and ultimately make better decisions.

Now that was the historical part.  Research for a mystery is a different kettle of fish.  I'm not sure you can know too much. You certainly might not use all of it in your writing, but you need to know it, because it might form a hole in the logic of your solution. The solution may rest on a particular cut to a rare gem. Perhaps such a gem can only sustain two types of cut, you think. But in your research you find that on very special occasions, it can sustain a third type of cut. And that may make all the difference.

A mystery is about hiding things.  The more you know, the more you can manipulate those things to make the mystery edgy, tense, satisfying.

Research is an odd creature, sometimes with a life of its own.  But it is a creature, nonetheless, one that mystery writers of all walks must learn how to utilize.