Fair is Fair

 
The international Miami Book Fair is taking place this week, up through Sunday, November 24th, with headliner guest Dan Brown. Crime fiction events include a panel at noon on Saturday, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America, which includes Libby Fischer Hellman (Havana Lost); Miriam Auerbach (Dirty Harriet), Deborah Sharp (Mama Gets Trashed), and Fausto Canel (Dire Straits). Then on Sunday at 11 a.m.,  there's a panel with Jeff Lindsay (Dexter’s Final Cut), Peter de Jonge (Buried on Avenue B); Tim Dorsey (The Riptide Ultra-Glide); and Bill Petrocelli (The Circle of Thirteen).

Across the Pond, there are two other terrific events taking place this weekend, including:

November 22-23, 2013
Irish Crime Fiction Festival
Trinity College, Dublin
Scheduled authors include Declan Burke, Jane Casey, Paul Charles, John Connolly, Conor Fitzgerald, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Kevin McCarthy, Brian McGilloway, Eoin McNamee, Niamh O’Connor, Louise Phillips, Peter Quinn, Michael Russell and Stuart Neville; and Michael Connelly will be interviewed by John Connolly.

November 21-24, 2013
Iceland Noir
Reykjavik, Iceland
This inaugural Iceland crime fiction event is designed to be "informal" with free admission and the chance to rub elbows with authors like Iceland's Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Ragnar Jonasson, Sigurjón Pálsson; British authors Quentin Bates and Michael Ridpath, who write crime series set in Iceland; and visiting authors, including Ann Cleeves and Susan Moody.

Hot Shorts for Cold Weather

 If you're in the mood for some good short crime fiction, there are three new entries hot off the presses. Grove/Atlantaic and Mysterious Press just released The Hunter and Other Stories by iconic author Dashiell Hammett. These aren't reprints, but rather new Hammett stories found among his personal archives, as well as some screen treatments long buried in film-industry files. The volume is edited by Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's granddaughter, and Richard Layman, author of the first full-length biography of Hammett, Shadow Man.

The Shamus Sampler, also just released in ebook form, is edited by Sons of Spade blogger Jochem Vandersteen and features new private eye fiction from Bill Crider, James Winter, Jeffrey Marks, Stephen D. Rogers, and many more. In Reed Farrel Coleman's introduction, he notes that private eye fiction isn't as popular as it once was, with the explosion of so many other types of crime fiction (cozies, thrillers, Scandinavian, etc). But he adds that the PI is an "important cultural icon because he or she embodies the struggles we all face as individuals in an increasingly confusing, alienating, and potentially dangerous world."

The new Dallas Noir continues the "city noir" series of anthologies from Akashic Press. David Hale Smith penned the intro, saying that "In a country with so many interesting cities, Dallas is often overlooked—except on November 22 every year. The heartbreaking anniversary keeps coming back around in a nightmare loop, for all of us. On that day in 1963, Dallas 'became' American noir." The volume has 16 new stories divided into three sections, "Cowboys, "Rangers," and "Mavericks."

To Conference

 

A reminder about two terrific conferences coming up this weekend:

October 24 - November 3, 2013
International Festival of Authors
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Special Guests: Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Linwood Barclay, George Pelecanos, Louise Penny

October 25-27, 2013
Magna cum Murder Crime Writing Festival
Indianapolis, IN
Guest of Honor is Steve Hamilton (the Alex McKnight series) and dinner speaker is Hank Phillipi Ryan (author and an investigative reporter for Boston's NBC affiliate)

You can still register online fo Magna, and tickets are also still available for IFA events.

Author R&R with Leonard Goldberg

 

Leonard Goldberg stops by In Reference to Murder today to take some "Author R&R" (Reference and Research). Leonard is the creator of the medical thrillers featuring forensic patholoist Joanna Blalock, which have been translated into a dozen languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide. 


Goldberg's latest release is Plague Ship, so named because a highly contagious, deadly virus strikes a luxury liner, which causes the ship to be placed under quarantine and not allowed to dock—anywhere. Their only hope may be David Ballineau, a doctor and Special Forces veteran, who is traveling on board with his nurse girlfriend and his 11-year-old daughter.

Here's Leonard to tell you more about the background for the novel and why he started writing medical thrillers.

I can pinpoint the exact moment I decided to write a medical thriller. It all began with one of my patients at UCLA where I was in training to become a hematologist. The patient had a terribly aggressive form of anemia that was caused by her own immune system making antibodies that destroyed her own red blood cells. The antibodies were directed against various Rh factors on the surface of her red cells. And since virtually everybody’s red cells have some form of Rh factors on them, blood transfusions were of no use in this patient because her antibodies immediately destroyed the red cells transfused into her. Various drugs had no effect and her worsening anemia was causing her heart to fail. Death seemed imminent.

Then we heard of a family whose red blood cells were type O – Rh null, indicating the cells were totally deficient in A, B, and Rh factors and could be administered to virtually anyone without fear of transfusion reaction. We took blood from this family and transfused it into our patient with antibody-induced anemia, and the result was spectacular. There was not even a hint of transfusion reaction. So the donor’s blood, which was type O – Rh null, was the proverbial universal donor and would be accepted by anyone without rejection. And this gave me the idea for an individual who was born without a tissue type, making that person’s organs transplantable into anyone without fear of rejection. My first novel, Transplant, revolved around a young woman who was discovered to be a universal organ donor and was hounded by a wealthy, powerful man in desperate need of a new kidney. The book went through multiple printings and was auctioned by a major Hollywood studio. And so I was off to the races as a medical thriller writer.

Then, other ideas for novels came to mind. Being a big fan of author Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, I began to envision a modern-day medical Sherlock Holmes, who happened to be a woman. Not just any woman, but one who was young and strikingly attractive and who on first glance would always be underrated. So I made her a forensic pathologist with a razor-sharp mind, who was every bit Sherlock Holmes’ equal when it came to observation and deduction. And so Joanna Blalock was born and was the lead character in my next nine novels, many of which went through multiple printings. While Joanna is still in my mind, I have created yet another leading character named David Ballineau, an ER specialist who was once in Special Forces. A curious and unusual combination, you say. True, but he is loosely based on a real-life story as told to me by a former patient who was once in Special Forces.

With all this in mind, let’s turn to the question of why I started writing medical thrillers. Perhaps, deep down, there’s always been a bit of the writer in me. As a matter of fact, in my high school annual, I was projected to become a famous sports writer. Then, along came a five-star medical education, a deep love for mysteries and Sherlock Holmes stories, and a few fascinating ideas for a novel – and you end up with a writer of medical thrillers. You might say it was a gathering of the right elements at the exact right time. And why do I continue to write and dream up new ideas? Well, there’s a simple answer to that. Because writing becomes an addiction. I think Oliver Wendell Holmes described it best when he called it “the intoxicating pleasure of authorship.”

 

You can visit Leonard Goldberg's website, which also has more information about his books and ordering information for Plague Ship and also his Joanna Blalock thrillers.

Fall for the Book

 

The annual Fall for the Book at George Mason University and other locales in northern Virginia kicked off yesterday and continues through Friday. The festival includes a number of mystery-related events culminating in the presentation of the Mason Award to bestselling thriller writer David Baldacci by Donna Andrews. Here are some of the other upcoming crime fiction highlights:

• Mystery writer Edith McClintock, author of Monkey Love and Murder 
• Mystery writer Charles Todd (Charles and Caroline both!), discussing Proof of Guilt
• Novelists A.X. Ahmad, author of The Caretaker, and Sujata Massey, author of the Rei Shimura mysteries and the new historical novel The Sleeping Dictionary
• Author Daniel Stashower author of The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Abraham Lincoln Before the Civil War, which explores how the famed Allan Pinkerton joined forces with the nation’s first female detective to foil an assassination attempt on the president in 1861
• A panel featuring members of Mystery Writers of America, including Ellen Crosby, Allison Leotta, Brad Parks, and David O. Stewart.

But there is a wide variety of other authors and poets who will be on hand, as well as additional awards including the Fairfax Prize to be given to Dave Barry; the Busboys and Poets Award to be handed out to Sonia Sanchez; and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, with Cheryl Strayed as the honoree. Also helping out this year, is the thriving indie bookstore One More Page, which will host some of the festivities. Best of all,  events are free and open to the public.

 

Author R&R - Geoffrey Girard

 

In Reference to Murder welcomes Geoffrey Girard for the latest "Author R&R" (Research and Reference) segment. Geoffrey was born in Germany and raised in New Jersey, earning a degree in literature from Washington College. He is currently the English Department Chair at a famed private boys' high school and also an award-winning author whose works have appeared in several best-selling anthologies and magazines.

Geoffrey's techno-thriller novel Cain's Blood and an accompanying spinoff novel for teens, Project Cain, were just published by Simon & Schuster. Both novels are based on Girard's novella Cain XP11, which ran as four installments in Apex Digest in 2007, and both deal with a secret U.S. Department of Defense project. 

In Cain's Blood, the government scientists use DNA from the world's most notorious serial killers to clone dozens of young men who have no clue as to their evil heritage. Playing a twisted game of nature vs. nurture, scientists raise some of the clones with loving families and others in abusive circumstances. But everything changes when the most dangerous boys are set free by their creator.

Here's Geoffrey's take on the inspiration and research behind the novels:

 

My favorite part of writing has always been the research.  (A genetic bent, perhaps, from my historian father?)  I once wrote an entire book (Tales of the Eastern Indians) because I felt I didn’t know enough about Native Americans and read for a year before writing a single word.

Cain’s Blood and Project Cain (about, in short, cloned serial killers) became my excuse to study everything from the early lives of serial killers to posttraumatic stress disorder. The genetics of violence to statistics of crime. Modern cloning capabilities and laws. Military scientific tests, human-rights violations, and subsequent cover-ups. All very interesting topics told through books, articles, taped interviews, etc.

The trick was (and always is) not to get lost in all that research. While the teen version of the book (Project Cain) is meant more as an “Intro to Serial Killers 101” for readers new to these men, both novels are (or should be) stories about people. And any research achieved needed to go toward that. How does that “fact” help shape a specific character? How does that new technical paper affect a character’s knowledge or reaction/attitude?

Jeff Jacobson is the teenaged clone of Jeffrey Dahmer, so I needed to know Dahmer pretty well. Many books, articles and taped interviews later, I felt I did. Of particular interest were an autobiography by Dahmer’s father and My Friend Dahmer, a graphic novel by a high-school friend.  Because these books discussed Jeff as a teen. I watched hours of tape of in-jail Dahmer. Studied the voice, delivery, mannerisms. How many would he have had at sixteen? How many were genetic in nature? His emotional detachment was, I believe, mostly physiological. How would that look/sound in the 16 year old version? Now I started to imagine this kid. I started to imagine Dahmer in a different place and time. Had (I admit) an old photo of Dahmer as a little kid as my laptop background for a couple weeks. Kept thinking about THAT kid. Before it all went so wrong. That’s the kid I now wanted to write about. Jeff Jacobson was born. I could not have written a word of Jeff Jacobson’s story until I’d done my research first. He just would have become some lame version of ME as a kid. And my kid problems were not the same as Dahmer’s – or Jeff Jacobson’s. For this character to become “real,” I had to fill my head with facts and slowly let the boy within all those facts start to take shape. Add in a dash of studying several real-life teens and Poof! It was like Pinocchio springing to life. There was no stopping him.

Castillo, the main protagonist in Cain’s Blood, was another guy who needed some research before I let him get into too much trouble. Again, he’s not me. I never served in the military, still can’t throw a proper punch, and PTSD wasn’t something to just dress him up some. It was, for me, an important piece in the books’ exploration of Nature versus Nurture. So, I read half a dozen books by vets with PTSD. I talked to real vets about war and coming home. Scoured for the latest books and articles on the treatment our vets are really getting and the most-effective solutions to recovery. Watched countless military training videos on various forms of combat fighting. [Did I still mistakenly call his magazines “clips” a few times, yes. (Learned that one too late!)] But, again, I didn’t let Castillo loose until I’d done my research and combined much of what I’d found with some qualities of real people I know into my new “real” character.

Real people are the products of the facts around us. We live in – are nurtured within -- a world driven by statistics, dates, physical evidence, and narrative history. In what ways has your character been defined by the times and places you’ve lived? The statistics and facts that have touched your life seemingly from afar? It is in those same ways we should hope to help best imbue our characters.

 

To read more about Geoffrey and the novels, and for ordering information, check out his website. You can also follow him on Twitter (@Geoffrey_Girard) and Facebook.

Mystery Without Murder

Although the phrase "murder mystery" has become synonymous with "mystery novel," there are actually quite a few such books and stories that deal with crimes other than murder. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes comes to mind, since many of his cases (e.g. "The Adventure of the Red Headed League") involved dastardly deeds other than murder.

Some authors have created an entire series that features plots aside from murder, such as the comedic Dortmunder novels by the late Donald E. Westlake, which follow Dortmunder and his gang of eccentric thieves. Several of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries (many of them short stories) don't involve murders, as is the case with Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax series.

Others, like Dorothy L. Sayers, wrote one or more titles in a series that were murder-free, like Gaudy Night, which centers on a rash of bizarre pranks including poison-pen letters threatening murder (although that doesn't happen before Harriet Vine and Lord Peter Wimsey solve the case). In fact, many of the masters of the genre through the years have turned to psychological suspense to fuel their plots, including Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey, about a man who poses as a long-missing heir to a fortune.

 Contemporary authors are also just as likely to turn to different plot devices, among them The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith and L is for Lawless in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone series. One of the Mystery Writers of America's annual anthologies, the 1970 edition edited by Dorothy Salisbury Davis, was titled Crime Without Murder.

That's just the tip of the blood-stained iceberg, of course. If you have your own examples, add them to the comments section. I'd love to hear your favorites, although it will probably mean my To Be Read pile will grow to the point TLC's Hoarding show comes knocking on my door.

Troubled Daughters

 

 

Blogger, journalist and crime fiction reviewer Sarah Weinman has edited a new anthology published just this past week, titled Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. Weinman selected 14 stories by women authors from the 1940s through the mid-1970s who helped create the domestic suspense genre and paved the way for writers like Gillian Flynn, Tana French and Sue Grafton. Weinman offered up a Q&A about the anthology and the inspiration behind it: 

Q: What inspired you to compile this anthology? Were you working on it before the big splash created by GONE GIRL?

A: TROUBLED DAUGHTERS emerged from an essay I wrote for the literary magazine Tin House. I'd been approached by an editor there to write something for their themed "The Mysterious" issue, and I'd long contemplated why it seemed that a fair number of female crime writers working around or after World War II through the mid-1970s weren't really part of the larger critical conversation. They weren't hard boiled per se, but they weren't out-and-out cozy, either. Hammett and Chandler and Cain, yes; but why not Marie Belloc Lowndes and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Vera Caspary? Why Ross Macdonald but not his wife, Margaret Millar, who published books before he did and garnered critical and commercial acclaim first? I knew after writing the essay that I wasn't done with the subject, and when I had lunch with an editor at Penguin on an unrelated matter and started going on, rather enthusiastically, about this widespread neglect, he said, "sounds like there's an anthology in this. Why don't you send me a proposal?" It took a while to organize, but eventually I did, and Penguin bought the anthology. Publishing being what it is, it's taken a little less than two years from acquisition to release date.

To answer your other question, I had just started putting the anthology together when it became clear that GONE GIRL was going to be a massive hit, and that I had a very easy one-sentence pitch for TROUBLED DAUGHTERS: “If you loved GONE GIRL, here's an entire generation of writers who helped make that book possible, and who deserve to be rescued from the shadows.” Flynn clearly tapped into contemporary anxieties about marriage, identity, high expectations, and whether we can really be true to ourselves and the ones we profess to love. So it's fascinating to explore an earlier time when many of the very same anxieties women had manifested itself, even as the very concept of independent womanhood was perceived to be a great threat.

Q: What is “domestic suspense”? What relationship does it have to other kinds of crime fiction?

A: Domestic suspense is a catch-all term for work largely published by women and describing the plight of women -- wives, daughters, the elderly, spinsters, the underserved, the overlooked, and many other phrases used then but thankfully, not so much now -- as World War II was coming to a close and the feminist movement dawned. Without domestic suspense you couldn't have contemporary psychological suspense. Conversely, the work of people like Gillian Flynn, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, Sophie Hannah, Tana French, and many more would not be possible without the likes of Hughes, Jackson, Millar, Highsmith, and -- though not included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS for reasons outside the scope of this interview -- Ruth Rendell, Mary Higgins Clark, Mignon Eberhart, and more.

Q: Which one of the authors in your collection would you like to see get more credit?

A: Bear in mind my answer will change daily, but right now, I'll say Joyce Harrington. She won an Edgar Award for her very first short story – “The Purple Shroud”, included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS – but she spent most of the 70s and 80s writing stories of equal if not greater excellence. Harrington also published three novels: No One Knows My Name (1981), set in a summer stock theater troupe; Family Reunion (1982), a very creepy Southern Gothic with quite the toxic family; and Dreemz of the Night (1987), a terrific mystery set in the then-contemporary New York City graffiti world. I love that book of hers the best because of the window it unexpectedly opened on a nearly unrecognizable version of the five boroughs.

Q: What was the first domestic suspense you ever read?

Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are The Children?, back in eleventh grade. That book scared the hell out of me, and only later did I realize what a pivotal book that was.

Q: What is the difference between “classic” domestic suspense and the writing of the new generation (Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, etc.)?

A: Largely the sensibility afforded by contemporary times. But there are many more similarities. For example, Lippman’s most recent novel, And When She Was Good, was about a suburban madam, and the way in which the suspense unfolded and she depicted Heloise’s nose for business and growing internal tensions could have been written by Margaret Millar sixty years ago (albeit with more dated references to technology.) When I first read Megan Abbott I thought immediately of Dorothy Hughes’ In A Lonely Place. The DNA of so many of these earlier writers inserted themselves into those writing today, whether they realize it consciously.

Q: Do you think women write better domestic suspense? If so, why or why not?

A: I'm a big fan of Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay’s work, both of whom certainly work in the domestic suspense field. Ira Levin’s books work so well because he knew exactly what domestic anxiety buttons to push – Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives absolutely count as domestic suspense (and, to a certain extent, A Kiss Before Dying.) That said, women are still struggling with the work/life balance, if I may drop in some cliches like “having it all” or “leaning in.” So there are more of them exploring these themes in a fictional universe, and that means more of them are doing so with great success and acclaim. I'd like to see more men write domestic thrillers and more women write traditionally “male” subgenres so that we can blur the lines once and for all. But forty, fifty, sixty years ago, there weren't as many options.

Q: You mention in your intro to TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES that the World Wars, particularly WWII, shaped the lives of domestic suspense writers, and consequently, what they wrote. Is there a similar “seismic event” that might have shaped the new domestic suspense, in your opinion?

A: I think these forces were at work already, but I hope that, twenty years or later from now, someone looks back at the current generation of women writers and edits a fabulous anthology explaining just how much the 2008 Great Recession changed everything. Which is to say, I think it did, and we still don't know by how much.

Q: If this kind of fiction grew out of post-war culture, particularly the idealization of women’s role in the domestic sphere and the anxieties and yearnings hidden behind that glossy picture of the happy home, is there anything analogous being written today?

A: Would that these anxieties could disappear entirely! But it’s pretty clear that any day’s headlines shows how far we still have to go. (Case in point: Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.) I do think it’s why Gone Girl was such a massive hit, and why publishers are now on the hunt for that “next Gone Girl” (best current candidate: ASA Harrison's debut The Silent Wife, just published as I write this, and released more than two months after her premature death from cancer.) Now we have domestic suspense mixed with the anxieties associated with technology, and there's a great deal of terrain to explore there. I also don’t want to exclude men unduly here; Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay also write very gripping domestic suspense tales.

Q: At your companion website, domesticsuspense.com, the tagline is “celebrating an overlooked generation of female suspense writers.” Why have they been overlooked? What influence do you think these women writers had, both on the genre and on culture as a whole?

 A: The author Tom Bissell wrote an excellent essay for the Boston Review back in 2000 about his time as an assistant editor at Norton, discovering, and then republishing, the work of Paula Fox, and the tremendous responsibility (and related fear) of being responsible for a writer's renaissance. Fate has a tendency to be cruel and quixotic about who merits posthumous recognition and who does not. I feel much the same way about the 14 writers included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS. So many of them won or were nominated for awards (like the Edgar), sold many thousands of copies, and were well-reviewed. But it's hard not to think that because their subjects were primarily "feminine" and "domestic" they weren't taken as seriously as the men, even though in many cases, the women wrote with less sentimentality and more subtlety.

Some of the writers included in TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, like Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, may not need my editorial assistance. But looking at Highsmith’s first-published short story "The Heroine" or Jackson's "Louisa, Please Come Home" in the broader context of what was going on over this three-decade period is what's key, as is seeing the importance of domestic concerns to female noir giants like Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Margaret Millar.

What I really hope is that the anthology allows readers to sample and be introduced to writers who have fallen by the proverbial wayside. Raymond Chandler held up Elisabeth Sanxay Holding up as his equal. Helen Nielsen is something of an enigma to me, but “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree” demonstrates the anxiety of being the other woman-turned-new wife and how it never recedes.  Nedra Tyre was both an avid mystery fan  and passionate about social justice and the poor, stemming from a previous life as a social worker; it’s why “A Nice Place to Stay” packs the punch it does. Barbara Callahan never published a novel during her lifetime, but "Lavender Lady", published early in her career, has the sense of depth and feeling of an experienced practitioner of prose and of emotional stakes.

For more more information about the book, the included authors, promotional events and ordering details, check out the anthology's official website.

Creatures, Crimes and Creativity

 
The brand-new conference Creatures, Crimes and Creativity (C3) is only a month away as it takes its inaugural flight into Baltimore, Maryland at the Hunt Valley Inn, September 13, 14 and 15. Jeffery Deaver is the keynote speaker at the event, which looks to gather together readers and writers of mystery, suspense, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and steampunk fiction.

If you are an author, August 16 is the deadline to register for the conference and have your photo appear in the C3 program (free!), and that's also the date for authors, publishers and everyone else to have an advertisement in the program. All attending authors will have additional perks, too: your books will be available in an on-site bookstore, with dedicated book signing times, your name and a link will be posted on the C3 website, and you will be invited to contribute to the C3 blog and offered a chance to film a video interview.

If you're a fan, you can enjoy panels and presentations from favorite authors, including bestsellers like mystery author Jeffery Deaver, fantasy/horror author Christopher Golden, thriller writer John Gilstrap and romantic suspense author Trice Hickman. Each attendee will receive a goodie-bag, plus there are book signings, a Twitter contest, and a scavenger hunt, with prizes like a Kindle, Amazon gift cards and paid attendance to the Love is Murder conference in Chicago.

Author R&R - Joscelyn Godwin

 

In this edition of Author R&R (Research and Reference) for In Reference to Murder, Joscelyn Godwin, co-author of The Forbidden Book, discusses the inspiration behind writing the novel, described as "occult fiction": a murder mystery set against the conflicts of Islam and the West with symbolism, alchemy, and magic fueling the action. Joscelyn was born in England and lives in Hamilton, New York, where he is professor of music at Colgate University. He is a composer, musicologist, and translator, known for his work on ancient music, paganism, and music in the occult.

 

It began when Ian Caldwell sent me the novel that he and Dustin Thomason had written: The Rule of Four. He sent it to me because the plot hinges on a real Italian book of 1499 called the Hypnerotomachia  Poliphili, which I happened to have translated into English in 1999. I enjoyed The Rule of Four and admired the way the authors wove the Hypnerotomachia and its mysteries into their story. The book deservedly rose to the top of the best seller lists, and I was asked to write a short, unofficial guide-book to it. In about a month I wrote The Real Rule of Four, which showed how Caldwell and Thomason’s novel works, explains all its learned allusions, and introduces the real Hypnerotomachia.

The Hypnerotomachia is an epic fantasy novel set in an imaginary pagan land populated by goddesses, fauns, satyrs, and irresistibly sexy nymphs. The language is a flowery Italian, expanded with rare Latin and Greek words. It’s lavishly illustrated, and the general perfection of its design have earned it a place in the history of fine books. The author, who was a Franciscan friar (though you wouldn’t think it), had a passion for classical architecture, sculptures, tombs, and formal and symbolic gardens. The whole book drips with excess of language, imagery, and emotion. All it lacked was a complete English translation, since the last, incomplete one was made in the 16^th century. Since no one else seemed inclined to do it, and the 500^th anniversary was coming up, I took it on.

So that was what inspired The Rule of Four’s authors in their blend of Renaissance mysteries with modern ones. No sooner had their book arrived than Guido and I got in touch with one another. Guido already had seven novels behind him. I had never written fiction, but I did see one shortcoming in this genre, which Dan Brown had revitalized. It draws on esoteric traditions, but only for atmosphere and decoration, not as realities. I thought that between us, with Guido’s experience in fiction and my long interest in esotericism, we could write a novel in which the mysteries are real. Neither of us shares the scientific world view, i.e. that scientific materialism does the best job of explaining the universe. Indeed, we hold it in utter contempt. So we would reach into the past, into that wonderful period of Renaissance Hermeticism. We would use it to give our novel not just historical but also metaphysical depth.

The material lay close at hand in the form of another mysterious Italian work, The Magical World of the Heroes published in 1605 by Cesare della Riviera. Like the Hypnerotomachia, it operates on several levels including classical erudition, language games, self-development, and practical alchemy. We would make our chief character actually practice Riviera’s form of magic, and it would have real consequences.

You may think here of the Harry Potter books, because there too the magic is real. But Rowling’s is a different genre. Her readers give temporary consent to the way things work in her world, and don’t expect it to be like our world except in a symbolic sense. In our novel, on the contrary, magic happens in contemporary Italy, as I suspect it really does. We don’t ask you to believe that, nor to disbelieve it. Just consider it as a possibility, and that the world may be a much stranger and richer place than the one most people choose to inhabit.

The Forbidden Book by Joscelyn Godwin and Guido Mina di Sospiro is available via Amazon and other retailers.

An Awesome Array of Anthologies

 Short fiction is perfect for bite-sized reading, whether you're taking a work break, waiting at the doctor's office, or just want a quick story fix. This summer brings some recent and upcoming crime fiction anthologies that you can seek out and maybe even take to the beach with you. They range from classic crime to dark horror to a book of essays about one of the most popular mystery conventions, and include many of the best writers working crime fiction today.

The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries volume 10, once again edited by Maxim Jakubowski, brings you the best in British crime fiction with 30 gripping stories from beloved bestselling authors and exciting new up-and coming talents.

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Malice Domestic convention this past June comes the essay collection Not Everyone's Cup of Tea, available from Wildside Press. Elizabeth Foxwell, a cofounder of the convention, wrote a piece on the Malice anthologies, and there are photos and plenty of essays, speeches, program notes, and other contributions from distinguished authors such as Rhys Bowen, Charlaine Harris, Carolyn Hart, Peter Lovesey, and Peter Robinson.

Also released in June was Crime Square, an anthology of twenty top-flight mystery writers—including Max Allan Collins, John Lutz, Reed Farrel Coleman, Robert S. Levinson, Martin Meyers and Warren Murphy—who portray New York City's Times Square through a century of murder and mayhem as a place where danger lurked around every corner, and where characters walked its streets with the easy confidence of a con man.

Noir Carnival from Fox Spirit Books hit the bookshelves on July 4th. K.A. Laity collected and edited tales that reflect the spirit of a dark carnival, "whether you picture it as a traveling fair in the back roads of America or the hedonistic nights of the pre-Lenten festival where masks hide faces while the skin glories in its revelation, it’s about spectacle, artificiality and the things we hide behind the greasepaint or the tent flap." The nineteen stories range the gamut from "In the Mouth of the Beast" by Li Huijia to "She's My Witch" by Paul D. Brazill and everything inbetween.

Author/blogger Sarah Weinman serves as editor for Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, due in bookstores August 27. As Weinman notes, where would bestselling authors like Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the women writers who came before them? The book includes fourteen hair-raising tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—who took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence.

Akashic Books continues their "City Noir" series with the latest release in that line, Manila Noir (Philippines), offering fresh noir from one of the most intense, congested, and overpopulated cities in the world. As Publishers Weekly notes, the Filipino take on noir "includes a liberal dose of the gothic and supernatural, with disappearance and loss being constants." Jessica Hagedorn, a Filipino native, serves as editor and divides the book into three sections. Part One is called "Us Against Them;" Part Two is entitled "Black Pearl of the Orient" and Part Three is "They Live By Night."

A little farther into the future (possibly sometime in the Fall), Akashic Books is adding Belfast Noir to its "City Noir" series, with contributors to include Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Gerard Brennan, Ruth Dudley Edwards and many more, with editorial direction from Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville.

Although the pub date hasn't been announced yet, Criminal Element's inaugural Malfeasance Occasional anthology, titled Girl Trouble, is due sometime this summer with fourteen tales from the likes of Patricia Abbott, Hilary Davidson, Brendan DuBois, Robert Lopresti, and Chuck Wendig,

The Ordinary Grace of William Kent Krueger

 

Bestselling author William Kent Krueger's novels have won the Minnesota Book Award, Friends of America Writers Prize, Barry Award, Dilys Award and back-to-back Anthony Awards for best novel, among other honors. Although known primarily for his novels featuring part-Ojibwe, part-Irish Cork O'Connor, a former Chicago cop turned private investigator living in the backwoods of Minnesota, Krueger's latest novel, Ordinary Grace, is a departure for him.

Krueger notes it's a different story from any in the Cork O'Connor series, focused on creating a particular time (the summer of 1961) and a particular small town deep in the heart of the Minnesota River valley that allowed him to examine memories, emotions and themes arising from his own adolescence. 

Ordinary Grace has its official release today, and in honor of the book launch, Krueger stopped by In Reference to Murder for some Q&A:

IRTM: You've described Ordinary Grace as really the story of what tragedy does to a man's faith, his family and ultimately, the whole fabric of the small town in which he lives. You also noted it was inspired in part by memories and emotions arising from your own adolescence and uses themes important to you through the years. How much of this book is fiction and how much is a window into your own soul?

WKK: “A window into my own soul” may be a bit strong, but it’s certainly a story for which I mined a good deal of memories, emotions, and experiences from my own adolescence.  One of the initial seeds for Ordinary Grace was the desire to recreate a time and place that I knew well.  I spent a lot of my formative years living either on farms or in small towns, and I wanted to capture—for myself and, I’m hoping, for readers—the essence of those years.  For a boy, thirteen is an important age.  It’s a threshold.  You stand with one foot in childhood and the other poised to step into manhood, and because of the confusion, the constant assessing of who you are and wonderment about who you are becoming, what happens in that time stays with you in a dramatic way.  That’s what I wanted at the heart of the story. 

IRTM:You've said the story for Ordinary Grace haunted you for a few years, and it was the most amazing period of writing you've ever experienced. What was your favorite part of the book to write?

WKK: There are so many scenes I love in this book.  But maybe my absolute favorite is the post-funeral scene in which the title—Ordinary Grace—takes on a very specific and special meaning in the story.  Another favorite is the scene at the quarry in which Frank, the story’s thirteen-year-old narrator, gets into it with an older, bigger, meaner kid named Morris Engdahl.  It’s a scene full of conflict and comedy and, because of the presence of a stunning young woman in a revealing bathing suit, rife with sexual tension as well.  I love the fact that Frank acts from his gut, without particular regard for the consequences, and I love the result.  Overall, perhaps, what I liked best was creating the tight relationship between Frank and his younger brother Jake.  A lot of love is exchanged there.

IRTM: Marilyn Stasio, writing for the New York Times, said that "For someone who writes such muscular prose, Krueger has a light touch that humanizes his characters." Muscular prose is a phrase often associated with Hemingway, who happens to be one of your writing influences. Do you feel that some of Hemingway's literary genes have become part of your writing DNA?

WKK: In my early years, I used to try to write like Papa Hemingway.  Eventually I realized how pointless that was, turned away from struggling to write the great American novel, and embraced the mystery genre.  I hoped I might finally write something that a publisher would buy and readers would enjoy.  Best decision ever.  But I didn’t abandon Hemingway completely.  Trying to write like a master taught me the power of language, and always, when I write, it’s with an understanding that words, rhythm, cadence matter in a good piece of writing.  Honestly, I’ve never been certain what was meant by “muscular prose.”

IRTM: In researching your other books, you've studied the Ojibwe and Arapaho, you've traveled to remote locations, interviewed various primary sources such as people in involved with the Secret Service, hospitals, the military, psychology, weapons technology. Was there anything new or unusual you had to research for the writing of Ordinary Grace?

WKK: In my very early thinking, I considered having Frank’s father, Nathan Drum, be a high school English teacher in a small town, because that was my father.  But because I also wanted to deal with the larger question of the spiritual journey, a minister seemed a better choice.  Growing up, I knew a number of PKs (preacher’s kids), but what it means to be a minister in a small community was completely outside my own experience.  I’m fortunate to know a couple of retired Methodist ministers, so I spent a good long time talking to both of them about their own time as ministers in rural Minnesota.  Fascinating material, and I’m sure their insights helped breathe life into Nathan Drum.

IRTM: What does your writing process look like? Do you aim for daily or weekly word counts? And how are you and Cork and your other characters handling the move from the St. Clair Broiler coffee shop? Any withdrawal symptoms?

WKK: Unless I have a deadline looming, I try to be relaxed in what I expect from any writing session.  That said, I’m very disciplined in my approach.  I write every day, twice.  The first round begins in a local coffee shop about 6:00 A.M. and lasts for a couple of hours.  Then I return to the coffee shop in the afternoon for another couple of hours.  This used to take place at the St. Clair Broiler, a Saint Paul landmark café.  I wrote there for a good twenty years.  For reasons I won’t go into, we parted ways a while back, but it was an amicable separation.  No withdrawal symptoms, but a lot of wonderful memories of my time in booth #4.

IRTM: Have you written a book (or short story) you love that you haven't been able to get published?

WKK: The manuscript that preceded Iron Lake (my first published novel and the first in the Cork O’Connor series) was a horribly written piece of work.  It was called The Demon Hunter and was about the ultimate battle between good and evil fought, I kid you not, in the cornfields of Nebraska.  I still like the story—go figure—and someday, if I have the time, I might return to that piece to see if I can do it justice.

IRTM: Are there certain characters you'd like to revisit, or is there a new theme or idea you'd love to work with?

WKK: I’m at work on a second novel set in southern Minnesota, titled This Tender Land.  Although still in its infancy, the story, when fleshed out, should deal with how we shape the land in which we live and how the land, in turn, shapes us.  It’s about those things we love enough to die for and love enough to kill for.  I like the fact that it’s another novel set in the agrarian southern part of our state, which has a beauty very different but no less remarkable than the great north woods I write about in the Cork O’Connor series.

IRTM: Every writer has to deal with rejection at some point. What was the toughest criticism you've been given as an author, and alternatively, what was the best compliment?

WKK: The toughest criticism early on was from an agent who’d asked to read that first manuscript of mine, The Demon Hunter.  She told me it was one of the worst pieces of fiction she’d ever read.  Though she tried to be gentle, her reaction devastated me.  Of course, she was right, and I learned a great deal from the experience.  As for compliments, one of the best I ever got came from my son.  He was pretty young when Iron Lake came out, and I wasn’t certain if he really understood what all the hoopla was about.  Then one day, as I was chauffeuring him somewhere, from the backseat of our car he said simply, “Dad, I’m really proud of you.”  Made me cry.

IRTM: Last year, you and three other authors (John Connolly, Liza Marklund, MJ Rose) embarked on the Atria Great Mystery Bus Tour. What was the highlight and "lowlight" of the tour and do you think you'd do it again?

WKK: Without a doubt, the highlight was the company on the bus.  John and Liza and MJ and all the folks who accompanied us were great, entertaining companions.  The low point was when the toilet on the bus plugged up.  Don’t get me started on that one.

IRTM: Although Ordinary Grace is a standalone novel, Cork O'Connor fans will be thrilled to know the thirteenth book in the series, Tamarack County, is scheduled for release in August 2013. Can you tell us about that and the further adventures of the O'Connor clan?

WKK: Tamarack County was inspired by a true event.  A couple of years ago, I read a newspaper account of man who’d been convicted of murder and sent to death row, where he spent nearly twenty years.  Then a group who takes on the cases of these kinds of individuals to be certain that justice has been done began looking into his situation.  In the course of their investigation, they discovered that, at the time of this man’s trial, the prosecution had in its possession information that basically proved his innocence, but they never shared this information with the defense.  On being released from prison, the man said he wasn’t bitter about all those years he’d spent behind bars.  His only wish was that those who’d put him there knowing he was innocent would somehow have to pay for their trespass of justice.

Which got me to thinking.  What if an Ojibwe in Tamarack County, Minnesota, was convicted of murder and spent many years in jail.  And what if information eventually comes to light proving his innocence, information the prosecution had at the time of trial but never shared.  And what if, as soon as this situation becomes public, the people responsible for the man’s unjust incarceration—the judge, the prosecutor, the law enforcement officers—begin to be murdered.  And what if it was Cork O’Connor who’d headed up the investigation that put the man behind bars.  So Cork is in the cross hairs.

IRTM: And finally: lutefisk or Minnesota hotdish?

WKK: Although I consider myself Minnesotan, I’ve never tasted lutefisk.  But top anything with tater tots and it becomes Minnesota hotdish, and what’s not to love?

Author R&R with Joshua Alan Parry

 

Joshua Alan Parry is a medical resident at the Mayo Clinic and and holds a B.S. in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Texas at Austin. Over the years, he has worked as a guide for at-risk youth in the Utah wilderness, a metal worker in Montreal, a salmon canner in Alaska, and a molecular genetics intern.

Joshua puts that background to good use In his debut novel, Virus Thirteen, in which scientists James Logan and his wife, Linda, have their dream careers at the world's leading biotech company, GeneFirm, Inc. But their happiness is interrupted by a devastating bioterrorist attack: a deadly superflu that quickly becomes a global pandemic. Linda's research team is sent to underground labs to develop a vaccine, but security is soon breached and Linda is in danger. To save her, James must confront a desperate terrorist, armed government agents, and an invisible killer: Virus Thirteen.

Joshua stopped by In Reference to Murder to take some "Author R&R (Reference and Research)," although his research apples don't fall very far from the tree:

 

Little did I know at the time, between my undergraduate degree in molecular and cellular biology and my medical degree, I had spent the last eight years incidentally researching the novel Virus Thirteen. I have spent an extraordinary amount of time sitting in lecture halls, passively listening to the drone of higher education. Even the best students, and I am not including myself in this category, will have minds that eventually wonder in such a setting. My own brain, always teetering on the precipice of full-blown attention deficit hyper activity disorder (ADHD), has had plenty of opportunities in these scenarios to dream of a future where all of this wonderful science and potential technology has become established.

Immediately after I graduated college I went on a personal journey, driving across the country by myself. There in the silence of the individual, my mind did wander yet again, with its newfound knowledge base and cathartic desire to vent itself. What would the world be like in a future where scientists have the ability to tinker with mankind’s genome as easily as an artist at a blank canvas? What would be the repercussions of this science if completely unrestricted? Judging by history, it would be only a matter of time before the less scrupulous among us took it too far, and quite literally created a monster. Forget about humanoid monstrosities though, when this technology is applied to man’s last great predators, microscopic bacteria and viruses, you have the potential to create the Frankenstein of the year 2200 A.D., a sinister creation whose miniscule size is inversely proportion to its ability to do harm. At the end of my journey, these questions had become the seeds of a story. In order to realize their potential these seeds would need plentiful amounts of metaphorical water and sunlight.

So in summary, education will build the knowledge base needed to write coherently on a subject, this is no different from anyone, intense mental isolation will provide the spark of ideas, and most importantly, like a nurturing gardener, countless tedious hours must be spent cultivating the story in order to develop it into a finished product.

--Joshua Alan Perry

Virus Thirteen is officially launched next Tuesday by Tor, but available for pre-orders. You can find Joshua on the publisher website or via Facebook.

 

Author R&R with Roberta Gately

 

Author Roberta Gately has served as a nurse and humanitarian aid worker in third-world war zones, ranging from Afghanistan to Africa, and prepared a series of articles on the subject of refugees for the Journal of Emergency Nursing and the BBC World News Online. Her first novel, Lipstick in Afghanistan, dealt with the plight of women in the male-dominated culture of the Taliban.

Roberta's follow-up novel, The Bracelet, tells the story of Abby Monroe, a young nurse determined to make her mark as a UN worker in one of the world's most unstable cities, Peshawar, Pakistan. But her plans are disrupted when she witnesses the brutal murder of a woman thrown from a building in Geneva. Haunted by the memory of an intricate and sparkling bracelet that adorned the victim's wrist, Abby struggles to make a difference for the refugees and trafficking victims she meets. When the mysterious bracelet reappears, she and New York Times reporter Nick Sinclair must work together to unravel the mystery that threatens them both.

Roberta stopped by In Reference to Murder to take some "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) about her preparations for writing The Bracelet, supplementing her own first-hand experiences with real-life accounts from people around the globe via the Internet:

Both of my novels, Lipstick in Afghanistan and The Bracelet, were created from my own experiences as a nurse and aid worker, and my often vivid imagination. But research was still a necessary ingredient to be sure that my facts and figures supported the fabric of my stories.

The backstory of The Bracelet involved the gritty real life drama of human trafficking, a hideous and little known business that required intensive and sometimes strange research into the dark world of trafficking in India. I turned to PBS, CNN and even YouTube to get a feel for the victims' experiences, and through their documentaries and videos, I was able to look into a victim's eyes without blurring the lines of myth and reality.

Once I'd seen the stories and gained a tentative understanding of the ordeals the victims had suffered, I turn to Google to investigate the sex trades in India, another integral part of my story. I vaguely wondered if my search using phrases like buying sex in Mumbai, murder in Delhi and a prostitute's life in India might not trigger some kind of red flag somewhere, and I half expected to get a notice barring me from Google. But undaunted, I persisted and my research, bizarre though it might have seemed to anyone who keeps an eye on those things, provided me with a wealth of hideous facts and figures, numbers that numbed my brain, but enriched my story. And, I'm happy to report, that even if there is a red flag hovering over my name on some internet watch-dog site, I'm still researching away.

My third novel, Next Of Kin, is set in Chicago, and though I've visited the windy city, I have nowhere near the experience there that my characters do, and I've turned to the Internet to supplement my story with authentic locations, events and traditions.  I've even found the brand new lakefront condo for one of my characters and I've chosen his apartment, complete with floor plan and layout. I've plotted another character's walk from the courthouse to her car, and I've consulted on-line menus to choose possible evening out meals.

I can't imagine trying to research a novel without the immediacy of the Internet, and my admiration goes to all of those authors who labored for years collecting their facts and backgrounds the old fashioned way, by pounding the pavement. And though I intend to pound a little pavement myself in Chicago, I'll have the benefit of Google maps and Internet searches to guide me along.

© 2013 Roberta Gately, author of The Bracelet

 

The Bracelet is available in paperback and digital versions, and you can follow Roberta via her website, Facebook page and Twitter.

Author R&R With Charles Brokaw

 

I can't give you much in the way of biographical details about Charles Brokaw, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlantis Code, The Lucifer Code and The Temple Mount Code, because Charles Brokaw is a pseudonym for an anonynous author. We do know he's an academic and college educator living in the Midwest, who is fascinated by history and archeology. He was also a friend of the late Martin H. Greenburg, the prolific editor of anthologies, and there's a Q&A between the two men on Brokaw's web site about the author's first book and the research behind it.

What I can tell you is that Brokaw's latest novel, The Oracle Code, is the fourth in the series featuring brilliant archaeologist, Thomas Lourdes, who is dispatched to Afghanistan to decipher the code found in a tomb associated with Alexander the Great, potentially leading to a lost trove of powerful weapons. But the Russians are also desperate to get their hands on the code and have sent a dangerous assassin to hunt down Lourdes.

Brokaw stopped by IRTM to discuss some of the research behind this book:

Researching the Ancient World

Saying you want to tackle such a vast genre as the mythology of the ancient Greeks and the life of Alexander the Great in a novel is a daunting task, to say the least. This is especially true since there are so many different stories floating around about what actually happened to Alexander the Great’s after his death. But that is what made this book so intriguing to write. There is just enough information out there to make a concrete story, and enough unknowns to leave certain elements open to interpretation.

The specific “unknown” that led me to write The Oracle Code was that pesky question that so many have tried to answer over the ages and no one ever could: where is the tomb of Alexander the Great?

Some Ancient Scrolls

The disappearance of the tomb of Alexander the Great is one of the greatest archaeological mysteries. And as was the case with The Atlantis Code, the “what if” question that has hung in the air was the perfect opportunity for Thomas Lourdes to step in and find some answers.

I began by reading and reviewing each historical document pronouncing the mishaps of Alexander’s early death and the ensuing burial. His tomb stood for centuries, untouched, in a sacred area of ancient Greece. However, it is also said to have occupied two different cities in Egypt as well as various other sites. I also spend quite a bit of time delving into the nature of the relationship between Alexander the Great and Aristotle, which was quite unique. Not many people know that Aristotle was actually Alexander’s mentor and worked quite hard to engender a sympathetic attitude in his protégé for the Greek culture since Alexander was actually Macedonian.

Traveling the World

An ancient scroll holding the location of Alexander’s tomb was said to materialize in Afghanistan. So I decided to take my research there. With a dear friend of mine along for the ride with a crew of researchers, we traveled to gain a deeper understanding of the Afghan culture—the food, clothing, trade routes and location where each scene took place. I didn’t just want to go to Afghanistan and start digging in the desert—I wanted this beautiful country to play a major role in the book, almost as a character in and of itself.

Herat, Afghanistan—the location of the dig and one of the main cities in which the book takes place, has an extensive history, dating back to ancient times. Heart’s location on the ancient trade routes of the Middle East, and Central and South Asia made Herat a vital city to research, especially when looking into the disappearance of Alexander the Great. We spent quite a bit of time in the major cities in the area researching primary sources and speaking with archaeologists who are experts on the subject.

The next obvious stop after Afghanistan was Greece. As I began shaping my own hypotheses on where the tomb of Alexander might lie, it seemed like the next logical step, particularly because of the nature of Alexander and Aristotle’s relationship. Also, there are so many links between the major trade routes that ran through Herat and Greece, so the connection was plain and simple.

I could probably write a whole series about archaeological adventures that take place in Greece. I spent quite a bit of time on the island of Delos, an island where Aristotle purportedly took Alexander the Great when he was a child. This island was seen as a holy sanctuary for a millennium before the Greeks proclaimed it the birthplace of some of their most revered gods. During the Greek empire, no one was allowed to live there. It was an island specifically for temples and offerings to the gods. So as you can imagine, there is quite a bit of history there as well and the perfect background for an archaeological adventure.

If you go there now, Delos is completely covered with ancient artifacts and the remains of countless Greek temples. The number of stories about the Greek gods could make your head spin, especially since there are so many variations passed down through the ages. To be honest, it took me quite a bit of time to wrap my mind around it. Although Alexander’s connection to the Greeks made the perfect backdrop for The Oracle Code and a hypothesis about his whereabouts that, in my opinion, might not be too far off.

--Charles Brokaw

The Oracle Code is available on Amazon as a Kindle special and has its own book trailer on YouTube. You can also find Brokaw via his website and on Facebook.

Author R&R with Maureen Johnson

 

Author Maureen Johnson has written several young adult novels, including The Name of the Star, nominated for an Edgar Award in 2012 for the Best Young Adult title. She's also worked with Electronic Arts as the screenwriter for the handheld versions of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince video game and earned an MFA in Writing  from Columbia University. The Name of the Star was the first in her Shades of London series and followed the exploits of Rory Devereaux, an American girl in London who crosses paths with a band of ghost hunters and gets involved in a string of a brutal murders breaking out over the city that mimick Jack the Ripper.

The second book in the series, The Madness Underneath, was just released and continues the exploits of Rory and the Shades—the city’s secret ghost-fighting police—as Rory tries to recover from the trauma she suffered in the first book (one reason you may want to read it first). Using the same mix of historical, contemporary and paranormal elements as in the first book, The Madness Underneath plunges Rory into a string of new inexplicable deaths threatening London.

Maureen stopped by IRTM to take some "Author R&R" about how she researched and developed the plots, characters and settings for The Madness Underneath:

The Shades of London books are really about London, in many ways. The city is a character, of sorts. Much of the books are about the London that can’t always be seen: the past, the underground, the secret services. Getting it right was vital.

I spend a lot of time in London, and I made sure I knew the East London neighborhood where the story mostly takes place. I did Ripper tours, then I worked on my own with maps and books. I researched underground tunnels—everything from the actual Underground, to sewers, to shelters, to graveyards and escape routes and (now known) secret bunkers. I walked miles and miles. I took pictures of walls and doorknobs and tiles. I watched footage of what it’s like to drive a Tube train, and I traced the development of the sewer system on foot.

And, for the first book, I did a lot of research on Jack the Ripper. I was trying to think of the person you would least want to return from the grave and roam London, unseen. And the person that sprang directly to mind was Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper. The name means Victorian England. It means foggy streets, and carriages, and the glint of a silver knife. It was a story I was fascinated by as a child. It was a real life mystery, like in the books. There’s something almost romantic about Jack.

This, when you think about it, is one of the most disturbing things possible. It would be exactly like saying there’s something romantic about Ted Bundy or Charles Manson.

The fifth murder of the Ripper series, the murder of Mary Kelly, is still considered one of the worst crime scenes in English history.

The real mystery is---why is this man famous? He murdered prostitutes, women who barely registered on the Victorian social scale. He worked in East London, a place that was rife with murder. It genuinely does not make sense that this man should be an object of interest for over a hundred years.

So that’s where the mystery started for me—why Jack? Why do we care?

The answer might be found in an incredibly boring fact. Up until 1855, there was a stamp tax on newspapers in England, making them far to expensive for many people to buy. Once that tax was abolished in that year, there was a surge in activity. Now everyone could afford a paper. One of the papers that popped up was called The Star, and the Star knew a good story when it saw one. Jack the Ripper was a creation of the media. Yes, there was a Whitechapel murderer, but truth be told, no one quite knows how many people he killed. It could have been four, or six, or more. (The canonical five are the five most likely victims, bearing certain signature injuries.) The publishers of The Star newspaper first saw the huge potential in the story, pumping it daily, adding frightening drawings. They were likely the ones who coined the name Jack the Ripper (this is one of the reasons my book is called The Name of the Star).

Jack the Ripper is a story based on fact, but the lines between fiction and reality are blurry. The Scotland Yard case files are surprisingly paltry. Almost no evidence is still available for examination. The culprit is most assuredly dead. But what we have left is the fear, so carefully cultivated by the editors of that newspaper. The fear is so well drawn, it doesn’t die. Jack the Ripper became part of a collective imagination.

After 123 years, people are still trying to catch Jack the Ripper. The investigation has never stopped, not once. Even though this guy is clearly dead, people are still trying to find him. Jack the Ripper has armies of people investigating his case, filling in the gaps in the files, recreating the scenes. And since someone solves the case every year or so, there’s always a documentary to watch, another story to tell. People have been giving Jack the Ripper the Wikipedia treatment since 1888. And it was from this point of fact that I started my story, and put the killer back on the streets of East London.

I started to look at things like the London CCTV network, which is one of the most extensive in the world, with an estimated 1-4 million cameras, a number that grows all the time. It’s difficult to do anything in London without being seen, if only by a camera eye. Mostly, though, I thought about how we would cover the event now. Imagine the frenzy if Jack was back and we knew what to expect, but not where. London would be prisoner.  The media would cover ever second, and the murder searches would be broadcast live. There would be Ripper Parties, where people gathered indoors together because you couldn’t be on the streets. At home, people would be in front of their televisions or computers, watching and waiting.

So to nail these details, there was a lot of reading. The main Ripper case file isn’t that extensive. But pretty much all the press is also available, and you could read that for a week. And that, in many ways, is where the Ripper legend can be found.

By the end of all of this, I was a walking, talking database of random facts about trains and sewers and murders—and normally that makes you a weirdo. Luckily, though, I can do this sort of thing for my job.

 

For more information on Maureen visit her at www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com or follow her on Twitter via @maureenjohnson. (FYI, Maureen was named one of Time magazine¹s top 140 people to follow on Twitter.)

BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled 2

 
Just released from Beat to a Pulp, the online 'zine and eBook publisher, is their latest anthology titled BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled 2. The work is edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker, and I'm proud to have a story included, along with the most excellent writers Tom Roberts, Kieran Shea, Jedidiah Ayres, Eric Beetner, Edward A. Grainger, Matthew C. Funk, Jay Stringer and Jen Conley.

Also featured are stories by Charles Boeckman and Paul S. Powers from the 930s and 40s "golden age" of pulps and two contemporary hardboiled masters, Wayne D. Dundee and Robert J. Randisi. The anthology promises that "this wild bunch is set to blaze a rat-a-tat sweep across the pulp fiction landscape," from tales of crime to private eyes to westerns and even a science fiction piece.

These thirteen hardboiled tales are currently available for Kindle at the bargain price of $1.49 and will soon be available in a paperback print format. For more BTAP news and offerings, check out the website and follow along on Twitter.

Author R&R with Robert Ferrigno

 

Before turning to writing full time, Robert Ferrigno worked as a college professor, a professional poker player and a newspaper reporter. His first novel, The Horse Latitudes, was called "the fiction debut of the season" by Time magazine, and he's been nominated for an Edgar award for Best Novel by the Mystery Writers of America, and awarded a Silver Dagger for Best Short Story by the Crime Writers Association. His 13 thrillers have been published in 18 foreign languages. In addition to his writing, he currently works in the videogames industry and would like to lose twenty pounds and find a near-mint copy of Space Western #2 at a garage sale.

His latest novel, The Girl Who Cried Wolf, is an eBook exclusive and follows the story of Remy, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who is kidnapped in Seattle by a group of environmentalist fanatics and held hostage in the vast and dangerous forests of Washington state. But in a tale reminiscent of O. Henry's "Ransom of the Red Chief," the kidnappers get more than they bargained for—the spoiled Remy demands a triple-espresso and a bowl of fresh raspberries and her wealthy father can't be reached because he's dodging subpoenas for insider trading. Rescue is up to Remy's boyfriend, an ex-cop with a short temper, after he can't get the FBI interested because Remy once faked her own kidnapping to run off with the pool boy.

Ferrigno joins In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about the research and prep work he did for the novel:

After spending a few years as a professional poker player, I moved from Florida to Southern California to take up a career as a journalist. This gave me the opportunity to meet and interview some very interesting people, from auto repo men to hot oil bikini wrestlers to CIA agents. My time as a journalist helped me develop the skills to make people feel comfortable enough to open up to me. There are many people out there who are happy to talk to you. Because I usually don’t approach people with an agenda, it’s just what I learned when I was a reporter, you just talk to people, people will tell you things. They will tell you deep things.

Now, when I work on a novel, I use the same techniques I learned as a journalist to shape and craft the characters of my story. In particular, for The Girl Who Cried Wolf, I wanted to write a story about the radical environmentalists that I run into across Seattle where I now make my home. I love talking to people who are on the outer fringes of society and some of the people in Seattle definitely fit that description. My books give me an opportunity to encounter and interview people who don’t see their own philosophies as extreme, and yet they definitely are extreme.

In the city of Seattle, you can’t get a plastic bag at the grocery store. The people I interviewed here really think the world is a filthy dirty place, there are all these things that can kill you, and our bodies are filled with toxins. They believe that life is an unclean proposition and there are a million pitfalls waiting to snag us, whether that pitfall is a plastic bag or a soda.

So to get character inspiration for The Girl Who Cried Wolf, I talked to people who are a part of various green political movements. There is a group called the black anarchists who wear black masks when they trash a place. For example, the Nike store had all of their windows busted in a few years ago by this group right before the walked into Starbucks to order a macchiato. I was able to interview a few members of that group, who weren't much interested in talking, but a good writer should be a good listener, and listeners get talked to eventually.  

So I interviewed people who, for one thing, provide such great dialogue that it lights up the page and gives the work an air of authenticity. It’s so great because they don’t know it is dialogue. It is just the way they talk. Yet to those outside of their immediate circles, it could almost sound like a different language. They are just incredibly passionate, almost to an extreme degree, about their cause and believe that the choices they are making about the environment are more important than anything else in this world. Three of the main characters in the novel are based off of these environmentalists. Glen, one of the key antagonists, is based on a man I met who actually speaks as angrily and vindictively as the character in the book.  

For The Girl Who Cried Wolf, I also did do some research on the chemical industry.  Talk about a very scary industry. There really are trucks full of dangerous chemicals hurtling down the highway at 70 miles an hour. Every once in a while, you’ll see a warning on the back of a truck saying it contains toxic materials, but it is in really small type and you have to know what you’re looking for. These are like powder kegs driving down the highway all around us and we go on our merry ways, completely confident that everything will work out. Sometimes it doesn't, and that's where good fiction is found.

Being an author definitely gives you the opportunity to research exciting topics and interview very unique people. My novels have always been focused on exceptional characters and exploring questions of makes the difference between a hero or a villain, or good and evil decisions. My interviews and research allow me to get to know the people and industries where these questions are posed every day and choices matter in terms of which role a character will play in their own story.

—Robert Ferrigno

 

The Girl Who Cried Wolf is available now via Amazon and other eBook retailers. Follow Robert via his personal and eBook Facebook pages, as well as his blog.

Writers' Police Academy

 
The Writers' Police Academy was founded by Lee Lofland, an acclaimed author and expert on police procedure and crime-scene investigation, and has become an annual event where authors can get a hands-on education in all aspects of law enforcement. Lee recently announced that the 2013 keynote speaker is bestselling author Lisa Gardner and special guest speaker is Dr. Kathy Reichs (creator of the Temperance Brennan series on which the TV show Bones is based). Also featured this year is a session taught by Dr. Dan Krane, a well-known expert on all things DNA, who has testified as a leading DNA expert in over 100 high-profile criminal cases all over the world.

Some of the types of classes and workshops led by police, fire, and EMS staff at an actual police academy include:

- Ride-a-longs with police officers and deputy sheriffs
- Jail tours
- Interview and interrogation
- EMS mini "Crash Course"
- Cold case investigations
- Crime scene investigations
- FATS (Firearms Simulator Training)
- Police vehicle driving simulator
- And more: K-9 teams, SWAT teams, Bomb Squad, robots, Static displays, Mobile Command Posts, Pursuit vehicles, Motorcycles, Fire trucks, Ambulances, Dive Teams

The three-day conference is held September 5-8 at Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, N.C. WPA registration will open this later month, and like last year, space is limited and slots fill fast, so early registration is recommended. (Sisters in Crime pays well over half their members' registration fee.) Also note the conference will once again sponsor the Golden Donut short story contest, with submissions of exactly 200 words to be based on the photograph prompt provided. More details on the contest will be posted on the website soon.

Author R&R with Mignon Ballard

 

The latest guest author to take some "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) here on In Reference to Murder is Mignon Ballard. A native of Calhoun, Ga., Mignon Ballard received her degree in journalism from the University of Georgia.

Mignon has published 19 novels, including three in a series set during WWII featuring Miss Dimple Kilpatrick, a small-town teacher who's an astute judge of character, quick-thinking and loyal to a fault. The Miss Dimple series captures a difficult but pivotal point in American history—the time women set out to work while their men are overseas—and they navigate how to survive while they support one another and their fighting men abroad. While that was a different era, there are elements of what these stories capture that transcend time and resonate for families today dealing with their loved ones deployed overseas.

Just released today, Miss Dimple Suspects is the third installment in the series and finds a worried Miss Dimple helping to look for Peggy, a first-grade student who has gone missing. During the search, Miss Dimple meets two kind women, Mae Martha and Suzy, who lend much-needed assistance. A few days later, Miss Dimple receives a distraught phone call from Suzy that is suddenly cut short, and she realizes that something is most definitely wrong. When Miss Dimple arrives, she finds that Mae Martha has been murdered. Suzy is nowhere to be found, and she becomes the prime suspect, but Miss Dimple knows Suzy wouldn't kill her friend and makes it her mission to identify the real killer. 

Mignon talks about how her own life experiences helped in researching the series and Miss Dimple Suspects:

Step back in time with me to a small town in Georgia during the war years of the 1940’s where the courthouse clock whirs just before striking; the town library sits between magnolia trees in a picturesque park, and almost everybody has credit accounts at both Lewellyn’s Drug Store and Harris Cooper’s Grocery. The library is built of logs with parquet floors and a stone fireplace at one end.  The Woman’s Club, presided over by bossy Emmaline Brumlow, is responsible for paying the librarian’s salary, and there’s a piano in the corner where readers can sit and pound out a tune if and when they are so inspired.

I’m familiar with these places because they were a part of my growing up years in a town very much like Elderberry during the 1930’s, 40’s,and 50’s, but my hometown was on the northern side of Atlanta. Because several of my characters volunteered at an actual ordnance plant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where explosives were made, I found it necessary to relocate Elderberry south of the capital. I did, however, retain the Cherokee names of some of the waterways as I found them too lovely and meaningful to try to replace.

The town is warm and welcoming in this place where friendships feature prominently. But murder is no stranger. I like for my readers to become acquainted with the characters and setting; to warm their hands by the fireside; hear the town clock whir and strike, smell the popcorn from the Jewel Theater and read the hometown news in the Elderberry Eagle. I want them to feel comfortable before they feel the need to look over their shoulder. Who in this kind place could possibly be responsible for the dark things happening here?

Several years ago I wrote a coming of age novel, THE WAR IN SALLIE’S STATION, set during that same period, and while writing it, did a lot of pre-Google research on that time in our history. I was a child when the war began and remember vividly the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. (I’d never heard of Pearl Harbor.) The war consumed our childhood, and shortages, rationing, and blackouts became an accepted part of our growing-up years. Of course the grammar school played a major role during that time and that is why I chose my title character, Miss Dimple Kilpatrick, as my lead investigator. The old brick building with the clanging, summoning bell is gone now but I still remember it keenly along with the smells of the schoolroom: the oily compound they used to clean the floors; chalk dust, muddy galoshes, and…ugh…forgotten banana sandwiches. The rooming house where many teachers lived still stands a few blocks away.

Because most of my memories are from a child’s perspective (no bubblegum or balloons, no new skates or bikes, making tin foil balls, etc.) I do have to rely on research, especially for dates and battles. The internet has been a great source of information on that subject. I also interviewed veterans; did a lot of library research; collected data from newspapers on microfilm; devoured old letters, and even obituaries. I can recall much of the music, movies, and entertainers from those days but it’s good to have the internet to refresh my memory. I doubt if many readers can remember when cars had no heaters, air conditioners, or turn indicators. Drivers signaled by sticking an arm out the window. And did you know that up until that time we stretched out our right arms to salute the flag until President Roosevelt deemed it too much like a salute to Hitler?

I recall those war years as a nobler time. But of course there’s always room for murder.                                                                                                            --Mignon F. Ballard

 

RT Book Reviews said of Miss Dimple Suspects that "A cozy should make you feel good, and this one does. Characters who are good friends, a strong sense of community and a satisfying outcome make this a winner." Miss Dimple Suspects and other books in the series are available via independent bookstores (check out these member stores of IndieBound and the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association) and in eBook form from Amazon.