Ed, We Hardly Knew Ye

As many of you have heard, the crime fiction community lost a VIP last month when author, editor, and blogger Ed Gorman died following a long battle with cancer. Since today would have marked his 75th birthday, Patti Abbott is collecting links of tributes and remembrances, which you can check out over here. In addition to penning dozens of mystery novels, including the Sam McCain, Jack Dwyer and Dev Conrad series, Ed was a frequent contributor to the Friday's "Forgotten" Books feature hosted by Patti, something I've been a part of for about eight years. I never had the pleasure to meet Ed and am depressed that now I'll never get the chance. 

Ed was involved with many anthologies through the years, often partnering with Martin H. Greenberg and others. I've featured some of those on this blog several times, as well as mentioned some of Ed's interviews with authors such as John D. MacDonald in Mystery Scene and other publications. I've collected a few of those snippets from the In Reference to Murder archives:

One of the Gorman/Greenberg collaborations were two books of interviews with well-known crime fiction authors, Speaking of Murder: Interviews with the Masters of Mystery and Suspense, published in July 1998, and Speaking of Murder II, which came out the following year. The first volume is introduced by Ed, who tells the story of how a Chicago talk show producer once told him that writers made dull guests. Ed allowed as how he agreed, since "compared to cross-dressing prostitutes, mothers who sleep with their daughter's boyfriends, and UFO abductees who have mysteriously started to dress like Elvis, I guess most of us writers do lead pretty uneventful lives." He goes on to add that writers are interesting because they're quiet and introspective.

Ed and Martin were also frequent editor of the annual anthologies of the best crime fiction short fiction. One such volume was 2008's A Prisoner of Memory: And 24 of the Year's Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, which included a roll call of the bestselling mystery authors today, Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly, Anne Perry, Marcia Muller, and many others. 

Ed's interviews with authors in Mystery Scene Magazine were certainly highlights of the publication. Some of his Q&As included an interview with Mary Daheim (IRTM blog link), chatting about the writing life and her new Bed-and-Breakfast mystery; Ed interviewing prolific author and mystery genre advocate, Robert Randisi (blog link); and Ed making an interesting connection by proposing we look at Charlotte Armstrong as a purveyor of suburban noir instead of traditional mysteries (blog link here).

In another blog post, I once noted that Ed had interviewed iconic crime fiction author John D. MacDonald, which you can still read over at The Mystery File. The prolific author actually got his start writing short stories - while he was in the Army in 1945, he sent a short story home to his wife, who promptly typed it up and submitted it to Story magazine. The editors bought it for $25, thus giving MacDonald the idea that he could make a career as a writer. He told Ed that after leaving the Army, "I wrote eight hundred thousand words of short stories in those four months, tried to keep thirty of them in the mail at all times, slept about six hours a night and lost twenty pounds."

Plus, there were many, many more times I mentioned Ed in this blog for various reasons:

• He was one of the authors who donated an autographed book for the Authors Love Teachers OK Tornado Relief Auction following the tragedy at the Plaza Towers Elementary School and Briarwood Elementary School affected by an EF5 tornado in Oklahoma
• Ed and Stephen Gallagher wrote about what it takes to start and finish that first novel in the book Writing Crime Fiction.
• Ed was a friend of actor Kevin McCarthy, best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and worked with Kevin writing a book about the actor's early days with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and starting the early version of The Actors' Studio, as well as McCarthy's work on the Body Snatchers movie. Ed later had a nice tribute on his web site after McCarthy's passing.
• Ed was not only an editor of anthologies, he also contributed several stories to such works, himself. I've noted several of those on this blog, including the Murder Past, Murder Present anthology, edited by R. Barri Flowers and Jan Grape, which included stories by members of the American Crime Writers League - the organization that Ed and Robert Randisi co-founded in the late 1980s. (Blog link here.)

There are countless authors who have been sharing their encounters with Ed, either in person or online, and how willing he was to help others as they stumbled through their literary journeys. We've not only lost an outstanding author and editor and a passionate book advocate, we've also lost a fine human being. Requiescat in pace, Ed.

Coffee Table Crime

 

Before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9-11 attacks, New York City was the epicenter of other violent acts. In 1920, Wall Street was targeted by a bomb that killed 39 and injured hundreds; in 1940, a bomb killed two NYPD officers at the World's Fair in Queens; in that same year, George "Mad Bomber" Metesky embarked on a 16-year reign of terror that kept New Yorkers on edge until Metesky was finally caught; and in 1975, the bombing of Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan killed four and injured 63, an act later discovered to be the handiwork of a Puerto Rican nationalist group.
 
Fans of true crime and photojournalism, as well as urban historians, crime buffs, and even crime fiction authors will appreciate a reference book hot off the presses from Hachette that tells those tales and more. Robert Mladinich, an investigative journalist and retired NYPD detective who was named Cop of the Year in the South Bronx in 1985, Bernard J. Whalen, a long-serving lieutenant in the NYPD, and crime reporter Philip Messing have teamed up to cull through over 175 years of true crimes in the NYPD's police blotter. The result is Undisclosed Files of the Police: Cases from the Archives of the NYPD from 1831 to the Present, which looks through some of the most horrific and shocking moments in crime but also turns a lens on the evolution of one of the oldest and largest police departments in the U.S.
 
From atrocities that occurred before the establishment of New York's police force in 1845 through the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 to the present day, this visual history is an insider's look at more than 80 real-life crimes that shocked the nation: arson, gangland murders, robberies, serial killers, bombings, and kidnappings. Some of the highlighted cases include:

• Architect Stanford White's fatal shooting at Madison Square Garden over his deflowering of a teenage chorus girl.
• The anarchist bombing of Wall Street in 1920, which killed 39 people and injured hundreds more with flying shrapnel.
• The 1928 hit at the Park Sheraton Hotel on mobster Arnold Rothstein, who died refusing to name his shooter.
• Kitty Genovese's 1964 senseless stabbing, famously witnessed by dozen of bystanders who did not intervene.
• Son of Sam, a serial killer who eluded police for months while terrorizing the city, was finally apprehended through a simple parking ticket.
• The Great Taxicab Robbery of 1912 that was solved with the help of Isabella Goodwin, who became the country's first female detective.

The 320-page chronological tour in coffee table format prevents each case in a succinct but nonetheless riveting manner that offers a step-by-step overview of the events, from the discovery of the crime to how the police went about trying to solve them (and sometimes not succeeding). The narrative offers up a personal take on the otherwise horrific material by letting readers know what happened to the accused after the trial and later in life.
 
The project is well-timed to take advantage of the recent true-crime trend in popular culture, particularly with television documentaries such as those on Investigation Discovery and the award-winning Serial and Making of a Murderer series. In addition to essays and behind-the-scenes analyses of investigations, there are more than 500 photographs rarely seen outside the archives along with mugshots, courtroom sketches, newspaper clippings, and even paintings from the earliest cases that predated modern documentary techniques.
 
For more information, visit the book's Facebook page.

Storypalooza

There are several fun, new anthologies that have come to my attention lately I thought I might pass along. The first two will delight fans of Sherlockiana, with new short fiction by a variety of today's best authors from crime fiction, suspense, sci-fi, and fantasy, while the third is sure to brighten your day.

Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, has a release date of October 4, which is just around the corner. Edited by Laurie R. King, it starts with one premise, "What happens when great writers/creators who are not known as Sherlock Holmes devotees admit to being inspired by Conan Doyle stories?" It features 17 new stories including Tony Lee and Bevis Musson's "Mrs. Hudson Investigates," a post-Reichenbach mystery in comic book format; John Connolly opts for satire in "Holmes on the Range," set in the Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository, a home for fictional characters who have "assumed an objective reality" (including Holmes and Watson); William Kent Krueger contributed "The Painted Smile," which centers on a therapist who treats a child determined to have his identification with Holmes taken seriously. Plus, there are other fine contributions from David Morrell, Anne Perry, Hallie Ephron, and Gary Phillips.

The other Sherlock-themed offering is titled Associates of Sherlock Holmes and is edited by George Mann. In this anthology, famous associates of the Holmes – clients, colleagues, and of course, villains – tell their own stories of the Great Detective. Follow Inspector Lestrade as he and Sherlock Holmes pursue a killer to rival Jack the Ripper; sit with Mycroft Holmes as he solves a case from the comfort of the Diogenes Club; take a drink with Irene Adler and Dr. Watson in a Parisian café; and join Colonel Sebastian Moran on the hunt for a supposedly mythical creature. Author Lyndsay Faye, a well-known Sherlockiana adherent, starts off the proceedings with Police Inspector Stanley Hopkins, who appeared in Doyle's "The Adventure of Black Peter" in a brand new tale as he works with Holmes and Watson to investigate body parts dredged from the Thames in "River of Silence."

The other story treasure trove comes in the form of Sunshine Noir, edited by Annamaria Alfieri and Michael Stanley, and features seventeen writers from around the globe telling of dark doings in sunny places. Hot spots include the Dominican Republic, the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, chic Mykonos, Seville at midnight, and on the morning beachfront of Ghana where a man has revenge on his mind. Follow an NGO worker kidnapped in Yemen, an engineer repairing a dam in turmoil-torn Ethiopia, a foolish young Englishman hitchhiking across the Sahara. You will visit historic Istanbul and Mombasa and learn the secrets of family conflicts in Singapore, in Puerto Rico, in New Orleans. Tim Hallinan provides a Foreword for the American edition, with Peter James doing the honors in the British version, and Peter Rozovsky penning the book's introduction.

 

Author R&R with Douglas Perry

Douglas Perry is a journalist and the award-winning author of the true-crime books The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago and also Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Oregonian, Tennis, and many other publications. His first crime novel is Mammoth, released today via Amberjack Publishing.

Mammoth is set in the small, isolated town of Mammoth View, California, which is hit with the news of an attack on a summer morning. It’s not clear what happened, but it’s bad. And it’s not over. As residents panic and leave town, the police chief and his deputy set off into the woods to investigate. The campsite attack is the perfect coincidence for Billy Lane. Looking for the biggest score of his career, he’s targeted the local bank. The robbery does not go well – and the aftermath unfolds catastrophically. Over the next twenty-four hours, chaos descends on Mammoth View. What really happened at that campsite outside of town?

Douglas Perry stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about about the inspiration and background for his new novel:

 

I am an historian by training and trade. My three previous books are all histories. So when I launched into writing Mammoth – my first novel – I knew I wanted to stay in the past. Making the setting a little unfamiliar adds an inherent sense of dislocation; it makes the characters and plot pop more.

My last two nonfiction books – The Girls of Murder City and a biography of Eliot Ness – take place primarily in the 1920s and ’30s. I know that era very well. But I didn’t want to go that far back for Mammoth. I ultimately decided on the year 1977. Because of the march of technology, it can seem very far away. There was no Internet. No smart phones. For most people, there wasn’t even cable TV. This is a valuable background for my story, which revolves around a mysterious incident outside a small ski-resort town in California. Something terrible and dangerous has happened, and our protagonists must figure out what it is – and survive. All without Google or 24-hour TV news.

1977 is also a good year to set the novel because you don’t have to be too old to remember it. I did a lot of research into the time period – there have been quite a few good histories of the era, such as David Frum’s How We Got Here – but I also have memories of that year. One of the main characters in Mammoth is a 16-year-old girl who dreams of being an Olympic runner. She could have been my babysitter in 1977.

The 1970s don’t get the credit they deserve as a turning point. Popular culture – That ’70s Show, Boogie Nights, the Studio 54 movie, etc. – reinforces the idea that it was the self-absorbed Me Decade, the vapid, fashion-challenged Disco Age. But that’s just the surface sheen. The politics were radical, bizarre, and outrage-driven. The idealism of the 1960s had curdled into something darker. The economy was tanking; crime was exploding. Mammoth is set in 1977 in California. So in the next year, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk will be murdered. The Jonestown Massacre will happen. (Remember, Jim Jones built his following in California.) The Zodiac Killer is still on the loose in the Golden State. The Hillside Strangler, also in California, is about to start his murder spree. The Prop 13 tax revolt is brewing.

Three years earlier, in 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley. During much of the decade, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, co-founders of the Weather Underground terrorist group, are hiding out in Marin County. (As it turns out, the house where they secretly spent a few years was three miles from the one where I grew up. They probably shopped at the same grocery as my mom.)

So there was a lot going on, in California and in the culture in general. It’s a fertile backdrop for a crime novel. And that’s what Mammoth is: a straightforward, old-school crime story. The 1970s were a great time for that, too. The decade produced a lot of first-rate crime novels. It’s my hope that Mammoth harkens back to the best of them, with the added benefit of historical perspective.

 

You can read more about the author and the book via Douglas Perry's website (with purchase links), and you can also follow him on Goodreads.

Author R&R with Terrence McCauley

Terrence McCauley had success writing short stories featured in Thuglit, Spintetingler Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Big Pulp and other publications before turning his hand to two crime novels set in 1930s New York City, Prohibition and Slow Burn. In 2016, Down and Out Books also published Terrence's World War I novella - The Devil Dogs of Belleau Wood, with proceeds going directly to benefit the Semper Fi Fund. His latest work is the techno-thriller, A Murder of Crows, the just-published second installment in his James Hicks spy series, Sympathy for the Devil.

A Murder of Crows opens with every intelligence agency in the world on the hunt for the elusive terrorist known only as The Moroccan. But when James Hicks and his clandestine group known as the University thwart a bio-terror attack against New York City and capture The Moroccan, they find themselves in the crosshairs of their own intelligence community. The CIA, NSA, DIA and the Mossad are still hunting for for The Moroccan and will stop at nothing to get him. The team find themselves in a strange new world where allies become enemies, enemies become allies and the fate of the University - perhaps even the Western world - may hang in the balance. 

McCauley stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R (Reference and Research) on how he went about preparing to write this novel and his other books:

 

Research has always been very important to my work, no matter what genre I may be writing in at the time.

When I wrote my western, I made sure I weeded out many of the inaccuracies created in the collective entertainment consciousness by movies and television. Cowboys didn’t say shucks and darn. They didn’t just drink sarsaparilla and Miss Kitty probably just didn’t run a harmless hotel. Townsfolk weren’t cowardly and almost no one ever had a showdown on Main Street at high noon. Just as people hadn’t travelled all that way and endured all that hardship to let some bully push them around, they certainly weren’t going to stand in the middle of the street and let someone shoot at them in broad daylight.

I did even more research for the first two novels in the University series (PROHIBITION and SLOW BURN). I wanted to capture the flavor of the 1930s without falling prey to the pitfalls of caricature we have come to believe as fact. Anyone who thinks Daymon Runyon’s work accurately chronicled the era is sadly mistaken. If he told the truth about the people he knew and what he saw, his friends would have made sure he took a long walk off a very tall building. For accuracy, one must turn to the photographs of Weegee and the writings of Herbert Asbury (Gangs of New York) and others to attain a better sense of the underworld at the time. Al Capone wasn’t a cigar chomping, Tommy gun-firing mad man. He also wasn’t the charming common man portrayed in archival film footage, either.

If research has taught me anything – whether I’m examining the past or the present – it’s that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The trick is to get close enough to it for the reader to believe it and be entertained by it. As Wesley Gibson, my mentor and friend once told me, ‘You’re not writing a textbook. People don’t care how it’s done. They care about why it’s in your story. Justify it and move on.”

I took the same approach when I researched SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL and A MURDER OF CROWS. Just as I sought to avoid the stereotypes of the black hat-wearing villain in my western or the cigar-chomping mad-dog killer of the 1920s, I wanted to avoid the stereotypes that the techno-thriller genre has acquired in the last couple of decades. You know what I mean, even though you might not realize it as they’ve become so commonplace, they’re impossible to notice. I didn’t want to write about the nerdy, socially awkward computer whiz with spiked hair, piercings and tattoos who resents authority, but follows it anyway. I also didn’t want to write about the hacker with the heart of gold or the criminal who reluctantly decides to fight crime or promote national security. And I sure as hell didn’t want to write about the foaming Islamic terrorist or the ex-special forces super-agent who reluctantly gets pulled back in to the fray of serving his or her country.

I wanted to write something different, but also something the reader could recognize. If I wrote an existential spy novel, no one, it meant I had to do my homework. A lot of it.

I started by deciding what kind of story I wanted to tell. Did I want to go the Le Carre route, meaning a book heavy on background and plot but not much action? Did I want a Bourne-like novel, with hyper-action and plot that got filled in along the way? Or did I want a Tom Clancy novel, wherein technology and lingo rule the day while plot and character development take second place?

Never opting for the easy road, I chose a little bit of all three. The collective Snowden and Assange messes helped me with the technological aspects of the story. I replaced the inked-up, rebellious hacker with a standing system called OMNI that gave the members of the mysterious University access to some of the most classified information in the world. Agents could not only access OMNI from their phones, but they could also upload vehicle traces, photographs of suspects and the fingerprints of suspected terrorists with ease. I employed a plot device I’ve dubbed near-technology, wherein I use every day technology and simply expand on our own personal use of it. Can the black box in your car be automatically tracked by satellite? Maybe. Can your fingerprints be scanned and analyzed remotely? They already are by the biometric device on newer iPhones. Can someone listen in to your phone or activate its camera without your knowledge? Certainly.

To a greater extent, could an organization like The University exist, one that isn’t funded by the government but has immense power and reach? That’s for the reader to decide. I certainly hope I’ve painted a convincing world in which the reader cannot only believe, but about which they will want to learn more. Through careful research and a bit of story telling, I strive to strike a balance that strains credulity only far enough for the reader to escape their reality and not fear for their safety. Because, like a wise person once told me, I’m not writing a textbook. I’m telling a story.

 

To find out more about Terrence McCauley and his books, check out his website and follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Grab a copy of A Murder of Crows via online stores or through your local bookstore.

Blood on the Bayou

 

I was thrilled to learn one of my short stories was chosen for the upcoming Bouchercon Anthology. Here's the official press release for the book:

Bouchercon will be invading New Orleans for its annual world mystery convention this September where every year readers, writers, publishers, editors, agents, booksellers and other lovers of crime fiction gather for a weekend of education, entertainment, and fun! It is the world's premiere event bringing together all parts of the mystery and crime fiction community.

In conjunction with this year's event, Down & Out Books will be publishing BLOOD ON THE BAYOU: Bouchercon Anthology 2016 edited by Greg Herren.

"I am honored to have the opportunity to edit this outstanding collection of stories," said Herren, an award-winning author of mystery and suspense novels. "It demonstrates the deep appreciation each of the contributing authors has to their craft."

"This is the third year that we have had the privilege of publishing Bouchercon's official anthology," added Eric Campbell, publisher of Down & Out Books, "and I share in Greg's enthusiasm for these stories."

Nearly 100 authors blindly submitted a story for consideration by three industry professionals, who had the incredibly difficult task of narrowing the list down to just 22 stories. Kaye Wilkinson Barley, Eric Beetner, G. J. Brown, Sheila Connolly, O'Neil De Noux, Barbara Ferrer, John Floyd, Alison Gaylin, Greg Herren, BV Lawson, R. T. Lawton, Deborah Lacy, Edith Maxwell, Liz Milliron, Terrie Moran, David Morrell, Dino Parenti, Mike Penn, Gary Phillips, Thomas Pluck, Paula Pumphrey and Elaine Viets were chosen to have their stories included in the anthology. New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham will write the introduction.

Each of the selected authors contributed their stories to the anthology and the Bouchercon Committee and Down & Out Books have agreed that all proceeds from the sale of BLOOD ON THE BAYOU will go to support the New Orleans Public Library system and by extension readers and writers everywhere.

Founded in 2011, Down & Out Books (DownAndOutBooks.com) is an independent publisher of crime fiction based in Tampa, Florida.

Mr. Bug Goes to Town

I watched a little gem of an animated feature-length movie on TCM the other night titled Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Never heard of it? I hadn't either, and as it turns out, very few people have any inkling the film ever existed. Why is that, you say? The film was plagued with production problems from the outset, but the real problem was that it was released on December 5, 1941 - two days before Pearl Harbor.

After untold hours of painstaking animation (this was way back before computers, remember), and all the loving touches that are so evident in the film, it's a little heartbreaking to think that it became another casualty, of sorts, of World War II. It was re-released in 1946 as Hoppity Goes to Town by Paramount, but was deemed a box-office failure and relegated to deep in the film archives.

The heart of the story has a little bit of crime in it, with a happy and innocent band of insects living in the "lowlands" of a garden near Broadway in NYC until a broken fence leads to The Humans tromping on their territory and disrupting their community. Our plucky protagonist, Hoppity (a grasshopper, natch), is in love with the beautiful Honey (Bee), but he's not the only resident of Buggsville who has his eyes on Honey - so does the rich and evil C. Bagley Beetle.

The plot piles layer after layer of trouble and mayhem onto the Buggsville residents that Mr. Beetle happily fosters (with the help of his hapless henchmen Swat and Smack) because it all ties into his plot to make Honey's father Mr. Bumble so destitute that he's forced to have Honey marry the rich shyster to save both their home and their little "town."

Fleischer Studios is the creative force behind Mr. Bug Goes to Town, headed by the often-quarreling brothers Dave and Max. (The Fleischers were forced to sell their studio to Paramount mid-way through production on Mr. Bug due to financial problems). Max Fleischer was one of the pioneers of animation, creating Betty Boop and Koko the Clown, with the Fleischer studio also behind the popular Popeye cartoons in the 1930s and the better-known animated feature film Gulliver's Travels.

Under the reissue title, Hoppity had multiple re-releases on home video with inferior quality throughout the 1970s and had a more recent DVD release by Legend Films, re-titled as Bugville. The film has now become a cult favorite with a younger generation of animation buffs and was transferred from an original 35mm Technicolor release print owned by the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film. That version was shown in 2012 for the first time on television in a special hosted by Robert Osborne and Jerry Beck dedicated to rare animated films, including Gulliver's Travels.

Todd Mason has a regular Tuesday "Forgotten Films" feature on his blog, and you can check out more neglected masterpieces via this link.

The 'Zine Scene

First, some happy and yet sad news: the latest editions of Thuglit have just hit the market in both digital and print editions, but they are also the last. The issue, titled "Last Writes," has twelve new crime stories "to blow your faces off like a mistimed quarter-stick of dynamite."

 
The Spring 2016 issue of the Film Noir Foundation's quarterly Noir City magazine is out, with an article detailing the true story of the U.S intelligence community’s role in the birth of Italian neo-realism; a look at Rudolph Maté and his singular directorial achievement D.O.A.; Imogen Sara Smith considers Douglas Sirk’s dark side; Steve Kronenberg salutes the silken menace of George Macready; Brian Light revisits Peeping Tom, still disturbing after all these years; and Kelly Vance sizes up the latest from Arturo Ripstein, the noir Bleak Street. (HT to Vince Keenan.)


In the summer issue of Mystery Scene magazine, Craig Sisterson chats with James Runcie whose Grantchester mystery series, featuring Anglican priest Sidney Chambers, has been made into a hit PBS TV series; Kevin Burton Smith takes a look at well-known writers from other genres who have dabbled their toes in PI fiction's waters-including the creator of a world-famous young wizard; Kate Jackson examines "The Wimsey Papers," a series of mock letters and diary extracts written by Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and his family and friends during WWII; Oline H. Cogdill chats with NCIS actor David McCallum, who has has taken up writing late in life at the age of 82; plus much more.


The July issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine continues the publication's 75th anniversary year with a look at its ongoing Department of First Stories feature that has helped launch the writing careers of several authors who are well-known today. To celebrate, there are new stories from nine of these popular authors.


EQMM's sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, also has treats in store in its July/August issue, including stories from two authors appearing in print for the first time: Jason Half with "The Widow Cleans House," and Mark Thielman with his Black Orchid Novella Award-winning "A Meter of Murder." 


The latest Flash Bang Mysteries features the short story "The Phone Call" by Herschel Cozine along with new short fiction from Jim Wilsky, Nancy Sweetland, Cynthia St. Pierre, Stephen D. Rogers, and Edward W.L. Smith. 

Author R&R with Jean Heller

Author Jean Heller takes some "Author R&R" today on In Reference to Murder. Heller's career has included serving as an investigative and projects reporter and editor for The Associated Press, The Cox Newspapers, Newsday, and the St. Petersburg Times. Heller has won multiple awards, including the Worth Bingham Prize, the Polk Award, and is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

Heller's new thriller is The Someday File, which asks the question, "What happens when the profession you’ve known all your adult life threatens to kill you—yet suffocating guilt and insatiable curiosity won’t let you walk away?" That's what happens to Deuce Mora, a columnist for the Chicago Journal, whose encounter with an aging, low-level Chicago mobster throws her into a world of political and criminal intrigue and confronts her with a horrific crime more than 50 years old that she will either solve or die in the trying. 

Heller offered up her take on "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) from her journalist's perspective:

 

Someone Will Notice

Jean Heller

A good friend of mine, a mystery writer of some renown, once spent nearly two weeks researching what type, appellation, and vintage of red wine would have been served with a cassoulet at a fine Parisian restaurant in the 1920s.

When I asked him why he had spent that much time on such a small thing from so long ago, he replied, “Because if I get it wrong, someone will notice.”

Indeed, my friend was not being totally anal. When you write fiction, you are asking readers to suspend disbelief and take a trip with you into their imaginations. But if you hit a pothole along the way, and write as fact something the reader clearly recognizes as an error, the suspension of disbelief bubble bursts, and the trip comes to a crashing end.

So it was for me when a famous writer wrote about a character field-stripping a weapon and got it all wrong.

As a former newspaper reporter, research and adherence to fact are ingrained in me. Like my friend, I don’t want to break the axle of a good story by hitting a pothole.

I believe in the old saw that writers should write what they know, but we can’t know everything about everything. I am a licensed pilot, but not an airline pilot. For MAXIMUM IMPACT, I had a steep learning curve. I have worked in skyscrapers, but when I wrote HANDYMAN I didn’t know enough about the “dirty places” in the buildings, the offices and closets and alcoves that make the building work.

Some of the research I had to do for my current book, THE SOMEDAY FILE, was almost as obscure as identifying a red wine from the 1920s. I had to learn a lot of minutiae about Chicago’s criminal history, current laws, geography, neighborhoods, customs, and Chicagoans’ unique ways of speaking. Fortunately, I live in the city, so I didn’t have to travel terribly far to scout settings or to find experts who could answer my questions, including a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago.

That’s my key to researching a book: I talk to people who know everything there is to know about what I don’t know.

For MAXIMUM IMPACT, I talked to several airline pilots and accepted United Airlines’ invitation to come fly their giant training simulators in Denver – the same mockups you saw on television when reporters were trying to explain the causes of several recent, tragic plane crashes.

For HANDYMAN, the manager of a new skyscraper in Tampa actually spent a day with me crawling around those areas of his building that most people never see.

On one occasion, I actually convinced the director of pharmacy at a large medical center to help me find a drug that would kill without leaving a trace and describe for me how such a drug could be stolen from his hospital.

These experts, even if uncertain initially about taking the time and making the effort to abet a work of fiction, all got into it as the exploration went along. They admitted when we finished that they’d had fun.

The perils of not doing this kind of research are evident:

I once read a novel in which there was a car chase through the streets of Lucerne, Switzerland. If the chase had occurred as the writer conceived it, it would have run along the bottom of Lake Lucerne.

In another novel, the writer blew up a tank farm in Iceland, apparently believing the tanks, in real life, hold petroleum. They don’t. The tanks sit over a lava basin and hold the hot water supply for the city of Reykjavik.

The moral of the story is, if you don’t know, do the research.

Because for every minor detail you get wrong, someone will notice.

 

You can learn more about Jean Heller and her novel The Someday File via her website, Twitter, or on Facebook.

Author R&R with Seth Margolis

Seth Margolis has written six books over the past two decades including Losing Isaiah, made into a feature film in 1995 starring Jessica Lange and Halle Berry. He's also written a number of New York Times articles about travel and entertainment. His latest thriller is The Semper Sonnet, in which a long-lost manuscript, written for Elizabeth I, holds the key to unlocking hidden secrets of the past—and to eliminating the future.

Margolis stops by In Reference to Murder today to take some Author R&R to discuss how he went about writing and researching the book:

 

My new novel, THE SEMPER SONNET, is a thriller that takes place in contemporary New York and Elizabethan England. I’m pretty well versed in the former, having lived in Manhattan for most of my life, but sketchy on the latter.

THE SEMPER SONNET is about a current-day Ph.D. candidate who comes across what she feels certain is a heretofore unknown sonnet by Shakespeare. But when she reads a portion of it on the air, she’s attacked and quickly realizes that the sonnet contains clues to a long-buried secret involving Elizabeth … and possibly the knowledge needed to cause global destruction.

Fortunately, I came across a marvelous book, ELIZABETH’S LONDON by Liza Picard. It is so well researched and so energetically written, you can practically smell London in the sixteenth century, taste the codlings (baked apples) and sheep lungs (no explanation needed), hear the cries of street vendors along Cornhill and Cheapside. There’s also fascinating information about Elizabethan childbirth, which was useful, since in my novel the Queen does indeed … but I’m giving too much away.

This book, along with a couple of biographies of Elizabeth and some strategic Googling, gave me the confidence to get started. But pretty soon I realized that secondary research just didn’t provide what I needed to set scenes in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.  I wanted readers to see, hear and even smell what it was like to live in Elizabeth’s England. So I booked a flight to London.

My first destination was Hatfield, Elizabeth’s childhood home. After a short train ride from London, I walked from the station up the hill to the palace, having made an appointment with Hatfield’s publicity manager. (It was closed to the public during the time I visited.) I was able to walk the same walk my current-day character would walk as she investigated the meaning hidden in the sonnet, which gave me invaluable perspective. I was given a private tour of the “old palace,” where Elizabeth was essentially imprisoned by her half-sister, “Bloody” Mary. This is where a pivotal – and invented – scene in my novel occurs, and standing in the great hall gave me the information I needed to write it with confidence. I took dozens of photos while I was there and scribbled pages of notes on the train back to London.

My second research visit was to Westminster Abbey, specifically Henry VII’s Lady Chapel, considered last great masterpiece of English medieval architecture. More relevant to my novel, it’s where Elizabeth is entombed. In a great irony of history, her tomb was placed directly on top of her hated half-sister’s. I was planning to set a climactic scene in the Lady Chapel, so I spent several hours there as groups of tourists came and went. I took notes on the architecture, the various memorials lining the walls, the points of access where my characters could enter and leave.

I imagine I looked more than a little suspicious to the beadles standing watch – yes, they really are called beadles. Their suspicions were no doubt confirmed when I queried them at length about the security cameras installed throughout the Chapel. To my relief, they were as knowledgeable about modern heat-sensitive surveillance technology as medieval history. I couldn’t have conceived of the scene without their expertise.

The beadles, and the welcome I received at Hatfield, reaffirmed a lesson that I’ve learned only gradually over the course of writing seven novels: people are eager to share information, not matter how arcane or unexpected. You just have to ask.

 

Find out more about Seth Margolis and how to order The Semper Sonnet via Seth's website, and you can also follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.

The 'Zine Scene

The brand new edition of Mystery Scene Magazine features a cover story on author Gregg Hurwitz; a profile of the influential and widely read Margaret Millar, an author who broke ground for such later writers as Ruth Rendell and P.D. James; Kevin Burton Smith's look at Jessica Jones, a "complex, conflicted TV hero for our troubled times"; Jon L. Breen investigates current legal thrillers that explore the limits of law and order; plus more articles, reviews, and the zine's critical favorites for 2015.

Thuglit Issue #22 is out and ready to "knock your literary teeth out the back of your head with eight brand new tales of misdemeanors, misdeeds, misanthropy and misbehavior." Authors with stories in the latest edition include Tom Barlow, Rob Hart, Matthew J. Hockey, Robert Hart, Joshua D. Moyes, Jon Zelazny, Willian Dylan Powell, and Nolan Knight.

Suspense Magazine's latest issue includes a new feature, "Craft Corner," in partnership with the ITW and The Big Thrill Newsletter, with Vincent Zandri and Darynda Jones kicking off things. Authors featured in this edition include Peter Straub (a Suspense Magazine first), D.P. Lyle, Tilly Bagshawe, and Bev Vincent, plus there over 20 pages of book reviews, short stories, and other articles.  

The new Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine podcast this month features “The Adventure of the Seven Black Cats” by Ellery Queen, reprinted in EQMM’s January 2016 issue, and originally published in the 1934 short-story collection The Adventures of Ellery Queen. This ingenious whodunit by one of the bestselling mystery writers of all time is read by Mark Lagasse.

The February issue of Yellow Mama includes the new stories "A New Cassavetes," in which Malcolm Graham Cooper’s young filmmaker finds his own "Mrs. Robinson"; "Blacksburg Park" by J.J. Sinisi, where a teen girl hides a gun for her bestie’s gangsta brother; Mark Jones’s "Tin Cry," featuring a thief who forfeits his cut for love ... stupidly; and Oliver Lodge’s "Prowler," a testament to obsessive creeps everywhere.

The third issue of Crime Scene features the BBC’s Peaky Blinders on the cover, a TV series starring Cillian Murphy as an Irish gangster in post-WWI Birmingham. Inside, there's more TV coverage, including a brief look at Rowan Atkinson as Maigret, which is coming to ITV soon, and as article about the Welsh crime drama Hinterland. There are also interviews with Harlan Coben and Mark Billingham; Barry Forshaw talks about his upcoming book, Brit Noir; and Orion Publishing’s Sam Eades looks at the anatomy of a bestseller. 

The March/April issue of The Big Click has gone live featuring short stories by and an interview with Libby Cudmore. The sad news is that this is the final issue of the publication, also the editorial indicates they're open to someone buying the zine and taking over. (HT to Sandra Seamans.)

Author R&R with Lis Wiehl

Lis Wiehl earned her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and her Master of Arts in Literature from the University of Queensland and has forged a career in both tracks. As an attorney, she served as a Federal Prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office, was a legal analyst and reporter for NBC News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Fox News, and is a Professor of Law at New York Law School. On the literary side, she has published a series featuring Seattle prosecutor Mia Quinn and homicide detective Charlie Carlson, although her latest legal thriller is The Newsmakers.

The Newsmakers centers on TV reporter Erica Sparks, who is detemined to success in the cutthroat world of big-time broadcasting, even if it means leaving her eight-year-old daughter in the custody of her ex-husband. Erica lands her dream job at Global News Network in New York, but on her very first assignment, Erica inadvertently witnesses — and films — a horrific tragedy, scooping all the other networks. Mere weeks later, another tragedy strikes — again, right in front of Erica and her cameras. But when she becomes a superstar overnight, is it due to her hard work or the result of a spiraling conspiracy that may expose her troubled past?

Wiehl stops by In Reference to Murder today to take some Author R&R and discuss the inspiration for the novel:

I was sitting in a steakhouse in midtown Manhattan when the idea for The Newsmakers hit me.

I'd been casting around for an idea for a new mystery-thriller series. I quickly decided I wanted to set it in a world I knew intimately: cable network news. After all, I'd been a legal analyst and anchor at FOX News for almost 15 years.

I've always been fascinated by journalism and its search for the truth. I think it's a noble and important profession. But it does have a darker side. It gives rogue reporters a platform to advance their careers by embellishing, or even making up, stories. I remembered the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair was the young New York Times reporter who both plagiarized and fabricated stories, often inventing characters and putting words in their mouths that bolstered whatever point he was trying to make in his article. What would happen, I wondered, if an ambitious, even ruthless television journalist engaged in the same thing, with devastating repercussions?

I felt the idea was promising but that it lacked a certain oomph. Then one day my friend Steve Berry, who also writes thrillers and mysteries, and is also an attorney, was in New York. He visited me at FOX news headquarters at 1211 Sixth Avenue, and we then went out to lunch at Del Frisco's steakhouse directly across the street. I was sitting facing the street and over Steve's shoulder I could see 1211 and it scrolling news ticker.

I told Steve my thoughts about my new series, the idea of a reporter who basically creates news to further his career. Steve listened thoughtfully, nodded, and then said the two words that ignited my imagination: "Go big."

I looked across the street at the towering skyscraper that seemed to pierce the clouds, its lower floors belted with the continuous news feed, and it hit it me: What if it wasn't one immoral reporter who was manufacturing the news, what if it was an entire network, led by an evil megalomaniac? And what if his goal wasn't just personal ambition, it was nothing less than world domination?

I felt an immediate surge of adrenaline and ran my brainstorm past Steve, whose eyes lit up. I'm afraid I was lousy company for the rest of the meal, because I couldn't wait to get back to my office and start making notes.

As I scribbled, my excitement grew and I called my agent, Todd Shuster, who has a fantastic editorial eye. Todd loved the idea. He had just read a psychological thriller called The Mentor by Sebastian Stuart, and suggested Stuart might be a strong collaborator. I called Seb and we had an immediate rapport, bouncing ideas off each other with mounting enthusiasm. To my delight he came on board.

The star of the series is Erica Sparks, a young and ambitious regional reporter with more than one dark secret in her past. Erica is the product of an abusive childhood, and struggles to build a healthy relationship with her own 8-year-old daughter. When she's hired by a fledgling cable news network founded by tech billionaire Nylan Hastings, she moves to New York and slowly finds herself pulled into a web of evil and depravity. While the story is certainly big and plot driven, we worked to layer the book with emotional complexity and suspense.

It was great fun to take readers behind the scenes at a cable news network and introduce them to everyone from the hair and makeup people, to the sound and camera techs, to the CEO. It's a messy, thrilling, and ruthless world that literally has its finger on the planet's pulse.

That's how my new series was born. Sometimes I wonder what would, or wouldn't, have happened if Steve and I had swapped places at lunch that day.

© 2015 Lis Wiehl, author of The Newsmakers

 

You can read more about Lis Wiehl and her novels via her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Author R&R with Scott Allan Morrison

Scott Allan Morrison was a journalist for almost twenty years, covering politics, business, and technology in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Morrison arrived in Silicon Valley as a reporter for the Financial Times during the darkest days of the dot-com crash. Over the course of a decade, Morrison covered most of the world’s top tech companies and chronicled many of Silicon Valley’s greatest stories, including the rise of Internet insecurity and the explosion of social media. Morrison's new thriller Terms of Use, which deals with the weighty issues of cyber security and social media, was inspired in part by Scott's background as a journalist.

Terms of Use centers on Circles, the most popular social network in the world: vast, ubiquitous, and constantly evolving. Days before expanding into China, Circles suffers a devastating cyberattack—and a key executive is brutally murdered. As he fights to save the company he helped build, top engineer Sergio Mansour uncovers evidence of a massive conspiracy that turns the power of Circles against its users. But as Sergio investigates, someone is watching his every move, someone ruthless enough to brand him a criminal and set a vicious hit man on his trail. Desperate to clear his name, Sergio turns to Malina Olson, a beautiful and headstrong doctor who has an agenda of her own. Now, he and Malina must survive long enough to expose the truth in a world without hiding places, where a single keystroke can shift the global balance of power.

Morrison stops by In Reference to Murder today to discuss researching the book and how his background played a role in its writing:

 

I spent a decade as a Silicon Valley correspondent for the Financial Times, Red Herring and Dow Jones Newswires, so I guess you could say I started researching Terms of Use more than 10 years ago without even realizing it.

I covered a wide range of companies, topics and trends, and over time it became apparent the companies that dominate the Internet have amassed great deal of power, most of it derived from their ability to collect and analyze our data.

I also met hundreds of contacts in Silicon Valley, some of whom became friends over time. Often, over dinner and drinks, we’d get into discussions about data privacy and the power of social media, and I realized that industry insiders were concerned about the direction in which we are all moving. Sometimes we’d get into “what if?” discussions and I began to wonder what could happen if this tremendous capability – which can most certainly be a force for good – were to fall into the hands of people with the wrong motives.

I had a pretty good foundation already in place when I set out to research and write Terms of Use. But while I understood what was conceptually possible, I needed a lot of technical guidance to bring my hypothetical scenarios to life on the page. And for me, that meant relying a reporter’s most important research tool: the interview.

Over the next many months, I interviewed dozens of Silicon Valley coders, network architects, security experts, IT consultants, entrepreneurs and even a venture capitalist. But before asking a single question, I made sure they understood what I was writing and why.

By and large, there were no set rules for these meetings. Early discussions were conceptual in nature, as I needed to build a credible plot. Once I settled on the overall arc of the story, I peppered my sources with questions about tech company practices, coding techniques and security measures. The next challenge was to simplify all the technobabble so that it remained accurate, yet easy for a mainstream audience to read. I repeatedly went back to my sources to make sure my interpretation of their words reflected their true meaning.

I also interviewed a friend who is an emergency room doctor. She was basis for my Malina character and the gnarly ER stories in the novel were drawn straight from her experiences. This doctor and many other female friends helped me shape Malina’s personality, and they guided me through a key decision this character makes early in the novel. My friends assured me they might well have made the same choice in the right circumstances.

My greatest challenge was nailing down the procedures, tactics, habits and language of law enforcement. While I could call on dozens of talkative techies, I didn’t know a single police officer or FBI agent. So I began putting out feelers, asking everyone I could think of if they had any connections with someone in law enforcement, whether a brother, uncle, or friend.

I got my first big break when I met a retired county sheriff and fellow author at a writing workshop. After pointing out that several details in one particular scene didn’t ring true, Dave handed me his phone number and told me to call any time I had policing questions. A short while later I discovered the new goalie on my hockey team was an FBI agent and he too agreed to help as necessary.

I never asked either of them to share confidential information. Instead, I’d summarize scenarios I’d concocted – chain of command conflicts, SWAT raids, taskforce meetings, etc. – and ask them to correct me when strayed outside the bounds of verisimilitude. Occasionally they would figuratively delete entire pages and explain how they’d handle a specific situation, right down to the weapons and gear they’d use.

And finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all those Google searches (the Lebanese emigration to Mexico, the mines of Bayan Obo, WiFi hacking tools, etc), as well as Google Maps. My novel is set in San Francisco, but it takes readers to southern California, China and the Philippines. I used Google Maps to ensure directions, distances and geographic features were accurate. More importantly, I relied heavily on Street View to help me describe scenes in the novel, particularly those set in Beijing and Baotou.

I may have spent as much time researching Terms of Use as I did writing it. But it was time well-spent, because it was crucial in enabling me to create a well-rounded story that has enough depth, context and atmosphere to draw in readers and hold their attention – hopefully – for hours on end.

 

To find out more about Morrison and Terms of Use, check out his website or follow him on Facebook, and you can order a copy of the book here.