RIP, Sue Grafton and Kinsey Millhone

I was so sorry to hear about the death of Sue Grafton, best known for her private eye crime fiction series featuring Kinsey Millhone. Grafton passed away Thursday at the age of 77 after a two-year battle with cancer. Her "alphabet" books with Millhone (beginning with A is for Alibi) have been published in 28 countries and translated into 26 languages with a readership in the millions. The recipient of the first two Anthony Awards for Best Novel (1986, 1987), Grafton has also won three Shamus Awards, two more Anthonys, and also received the highest achievement in U.S. crime fiction, the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 2009. In addition, she was presented with Bouchercon's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Grafton's latest installment in her Millhone series was Y is for Yesterday, and she had plans for the final installment, to be titled Z is for Zero. However, her daughter Jamie wrote on Facebook that Kinsey's crime-solving days are over. "Sue always said that she would continue writing as long as she had the juice...Many of you also know that she was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows, and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y."

Here are some of the latest tributes from the New York Times, Mystery Fanfare, The Washington Post, and Ruth Jordan (Crimespree Magazine).

Author R&R with Trey R. Barker

Trey R. Barker spent nearly two decades as an on-again/off-again journalist before moving into law enforcement in North-Central Illinois, at the Bureau County Sheriff’s Office. He is currently a sergeant of patrol with a specialty in crisis negotiations and on-line child sexual exploitation and an investigator for the Illinois Attorney General’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

He's also the author of more than 200 short stories, as well as the Barefield trilogy – 2000 Miles to Open Road, Exit Blood, Death is Not Forever – published by Down & Out Books. The first two books in his Jace Salome novels were published by Five Star (which has since dropped its crime fiction line), but the third installment in the series, When the Lonesome Dog Barks, is being published by Down & Out.

Trey stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the book and how his day job influenced and inspired the work:

In The Eyes…The Words

By Trey R. Barker

By the time I knocked on his door, I had the evidence.

As always, I’d been gathering it for months.  Peer-to-peer software, his computer constantly sharing specific files with my task force computer; back and forth, request and answer, a digital, forensic version of the call and response liturgy.

By the time I knocked on his door, I knew the man. I knew his public habits, his employment and wife’s name.  I knew his child’s name and where he lived.

I knew, when I knocked on his door, exactly what I would see. I knew exactly the look I would see in his eyes when he saw me and my team. He would know, instantly, why we were there.  I would see tears and anger, eyes darting and looking for a way out, hyperventilating, self-loathing, slivers of relief that it was now over. He would stammer but nod thoughtfully when I told him his IP came up in an internet investigation.  He would offer to help any way he could, but he would give signals that he wanted to talk to us privately, rather than in front of his family.

And when we were talking privately, when I showed him the evidence his computer had already sent me, he would admit to trading child pornography. He would tell me everything and it would be awful for everyone in that house.

It always was and by that time, I had done scores of these cases.

I knew, when I knocked on his door, that I would see him, his wife, his child.

Yet when I actually knocked, I did not see what I expected.  Instead, I saw the nine neighborhood children who attended his wife’s on-site day care.

My heart broke.

* * *

Ultimately, every child who looked at me that day was forensically interviewed and there was exactly zero evidence the man had ever touched a child.  He pleaded guilty and took a lengthy prison sentence.  It played out how it always had in those investigations. I did those investigations for almost five years before I had to stop and with every investigation, my heart broke. Regardless of the outcome—plea or trial—my heart broke for those children in the pictures that my suspects so blithely traded.  There was never a thought for those children by the men who traded, in spite of what those men would eventually tell me (and I promise you the justifications can make you stop breathing). Even if the pictures and videos were decades old, the children long since grown up to be their own monsters or to save others from the monsters or dead from their own hand because they couldn’t fight the monsters anymore, my heart constantly shattered.

That is what I used in When The Lonesome Dog Barks, the third Jace Salome novel (Down and Out Books, November, 2017).

While there is no child pornography in Lonesome Dog, what I learned working on two child sexual exploitation task forces (one state-level and one Federal-level) came to bear. I was basically researching by reaching into my own memory. I took what I had worked with on the task forces, the way files were shared and spread and viewed, and then bent and shaped that knowledge into something I could use to help craft this story.

In terms of the technical end of things, I did tap into the brain of my team’s uber-computer-guru to make sure I hadn’t screwed it up, but for the emotional things, I tapped into the horrors that each and every officer who’s done these kinds of cases can easily dredge up. What I described at the beginning of this piece—everything packed so deeply and tightly into the suspects’ eyes, and their justifications afterward—were what I tried to unpack for When The Lonesome Dog Barks.

Yet the thing I tried the hardest to recreate, the thing that still haunts me the most, were the interviews and the justifications.  Not the words, those were predictable enough (like the man who told me it was the fault of the four-year old girl in the forced-sex videos “…because look how she was dressed!” or the man who told me he and his male cousin were just fooling around trading pictures of their own cocks back and forth and “…it got a little crazy.”), but the utter lack of remorse.

Once caught, they were all remorseful, but it was window dressing—cheap blinds covering the fact that they had not an ounce of actual remorse.  To them, the pictures were fantasy and make-believe; no one really got hurt making those pictures, no one was truly molested, no one was truly damaged to the point of killing themselves.  To those men, the pictures with full color and the videos with stereo sound were nothing more than a means to an end, and as long as that end was pleasure, then who the hell cared about the means?

And yes, it was exactly the same for those men who had been molested themselves.  They had felt the terror in the most visceral way possible and now, years later, cared not at all about that same terror being visited upon someone else.

An odd fact for you…in every single one of my cases that involved the suspect having been molested as a child, the age group the suspects looked at was always the age they themselves had been molested.

 So the research for Lonesome Dog was not geography or cultural norms or street dialect.  It was reaction and emotion, usage of another human being; it was trying to convey to my readers exactly what I heard my suspects say when I looked in their eyes after I had knocked on their doors.

 

You can find out more about Trey R. Barker and his writing via his website and follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads. His book When the Lonesome Dog Barks is now available via all major online and print booksellers.

Author R&R with Michael Mayo

Michael Mayo has written about film for the Washington Post and the Roanoke Times. He was the host of the nationally syndicated radio programs Movie Show on Radio and Max and Mike on the Movies. He is the author of American Murder: Criminals, Crime, and the Media, as well as VideoHound’s Video Premieres, Horror Show, and War Movies.

His first novel, Jimmy the Stick, which was published in 2012, initiated the Jimmy Quinn series set in the bloody days of Prohibition. From the bar of his quiet little speakeasy, this limping tough guy serves drinks to every hood in Manhattan—at least until the bullets start to fly. Publishers Weekly said of the series, "Mayo persuasively portrays such real-life mobsters as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano in a tale sure to appeal to fans of Max Allan Collins’s gangster historicals."

The latest installment of Jimmy Quinn's adventures is Jimmy and Fay, set right as King Kong is premiering at Radio City Music Hall, and Fay Wray is about to become the most famous actress on earth. So what’s she doing hanging around a rundown Manhattan speakeasy? This Hollywood scream queen has come to see Jimmy Quinn after a blackmailer has pictures of a Fay Wray lookalike engaged in conduct that would make King Kong blush. Jimmy tries to settle the matter quietly, but stopping the extortion will cut just as deeply as Fay’s famous scream, ringing from Broadway all the way to Chinatown.

Michael Mayo stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing a Prohibition-era setting:

 

Prohibition New York – Greatest. Setting. Ever.

Prohibition really was the Golden Age for American crime. With the passage of the Volstead Act which in 1920 prohibited the possession, sale and transportation of beer, wine and spirits, bad guys became good guys to anyone who simply wanted to buy a drink. Big city cops and elected officials certainly didn’t believe in the new law. They saw it as something forced on them by appleknockers from the sticks. Sure, all the saloons closed down, but speakeasies opened right up, and the Twenties were ready to roar.

New York was already undergoing a massive transformation. The economic boom just beginning to power up Wall Street. Thousands of young men were returning from World War I, and thousands of young women were moving from the hinterlands to work in offices. All of them wanted to have some fun.

That’s the city that I write about in the Jimmy Quinn novels. It’s equal parts Warner Bros. movies, Dashiell Hammett and Damon Runyon stories, the photographs of Berenice Abbott and Margaret Bourke White, and the paintings of Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. During those years, America became the country we recognize today. Men quit wearing high stiff collars and long coats. Their tailored suits are essentially unchanged. Young women had just thrown off the heavy drapery of Victorian clothes and were experimenting with fashion. The cars may never have been so cool.

 At the center of everything was money.

As the famous madam Polly Adler put it, “In the world of the Twenties, as I saw it, the only unforgiveable sin was to be poor—Money was what counted… Everybody had an angle, everybody was raking in the chips, there was no excuse not to have money—and along with everybody else, I was right there, with my feet planted firmly in the trough.”

New York was (and is) a city that ran on money, alcohol and sex, and Prohibition brought those three together in an important new way. The saloon had been an all-male enterprise. A woman who was not a prostitute or a temperance crusader wouldn’t think of setting foot inside one. Speakeasies, however, were open to everyone. And Prohibition added another exotic element; it made alcohol forbidden fruit to the newly liberated “flappers,” a generation of young women who were eager to break old rules and to try new things. Collectively these guys and dolls were referred to by their disapproving elders as “flaming youth.” Hubba-hubba.

And it wasn’t only the patrons of speakeasies who were young. Many of the mobsters who made their fortunes in bootlegging were surprisingly youthful. When Prohibition began, “Lucky” Luciano was the old man of his group at 23. Meyer Lansky was 18; their friend Ben “Bugsy” Siegel was 14. These guys had grown up on the streets and were experienced beyond their years. By the time Prohibition was repealed, they were millionaires.

Of course, there was considerable violence, too, as there is with any extremely profitable, extremely competitive illegal enterprise. Particularly in the early days, Luciano, Lansky and Siegel were ambitious and ruthless. But as long as gangsters were shooting gangsters, nobody got too upset about it.

In short, Prohibition-era New York was young, stylish, sinful and unrepentant. Could a crime writer ask for anything more?

 

You read learn more about Mike, his books, and Jimmy and Fay via his website or check out a recent interview with Mystery Scene Magazine. His books are available via most online and brick-and-mortar bookstores.

 

Author R&R with Lawrence Kelter

Lawrence Kelter is a resident New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn and residing on Long Island, and often uses Manhattan and Long Island as backdrops for his stories. Early in his career, he received direction from bestselling novelist Nelson DeMille, who put pencil to paper to assist in the editing of his first book, and Kelter was also a member of a private writing workshop led by the late soap opera legend and AFTRA president, Ann Loring. Since then, he's authored three novels featuring street savvy NYPD detective, Stephanie Chalice:  Don't Close Your Eyes, Ransom Beach, and The Brain Vault.

Most recently, he's been tapped to write Back to Brooklyn, the literary sequel to Dale Launer's classic legal comedy film My Cousin Vinny. Kelter answered some burning questions about how that project came to pass:

How did the chance to write BACK TO BROOKLYN come about?

Lawrence Kelter: There was one specific project I always wanted to be involved in, but like the rock star dream and the Super Bowl victory, I thought it was not to be. You might think this silly or lame. And maybe it is. There was a film I enjoyed so much that every time it popped up on TV, it made me late for an appointment because I just couldn’t pull myself away. I knew the script verbatim and often incorporated the better-known lines into my everyday conversation. That movie is My Cousin Vinny.

It popped up on the tube about two years ago, and I decided to email the screenwriter/producer to tell him how much I loved his film, thinking, Hollywood screenwriter—I’m dirt beneath his boot—He’ll never reply.

But he did.

And somehow we forged a connection. Emails led to conversations. He discussed his upcoming projects with me, and I with him. One day he called up and said, “Hey, I read one of your books and you’re pretty f_ _king funny.”

“So how about you let me turn My Cousin Vinny into a book series?”

“Make me an offer.”

Four attorneys and fourteen months later, BACK TO BROOKLYN was delivered to Eric Campbell, publisher of Down & Out Books.

What was the most rewarding part of writing established characters like Lisa and Vincent? The most challenging part?

Lawrence Kelter: Writing BACK TO BROOKLYN was the most fun I’ve ever had sitting in front of a keyboard. I have high hopes for this book. After all, I love the characters and the backstory—not to mention the two years I have invested in the project. But where it goes from here… I've received a great deal of feedback from readers. Almost universally they tell me that that they can hear Lisa and Vinny in their heads playing that cat and mouse game--they visualize Marisa Tomei and Joe Pesci as they're reading. Nothing could be more rewarding than that.

At the onset there were two big challenges that gave me pause. 1) I had to get the voices just right--my Vinny and Lisa had to sound exactly like Vinny and Lisa from the film with the same type of smart Alec rhetoric and the same colloquialisms. They had to think alike and  react alike. In the words of Beechum County DA Jim Trotter III, they had to be, "IDENTICAL!" 2) The movie reveal was just so damn clever and startling that it was a real challenge to develop a plot that felt like the original but was completely different, and at the end ... well, it was a serious undertaking to reveal the true villain and his MO without relying on "magic grits" and "Positraction."

Why should fans of My Cousin Vinny read BACK TO BROOKLYN?

 

Lawrence Kelter: Fans of the film will instantly fall back in love with Vinny and Lisa and hopefully laugh just as hard as they did the first time they saw the film. In the words of New York Times bestselling author William Landay: "Like visiting with old friends, BACK TO BROOKLYN captures the fun and spontaneity of every lawyer's favorite legal comedy, My Cousin Vinny. As surefooted as a '63 Pontiac with Positraction." 

 

Have you heard feedback on BACK TO BROOKLYN from the original movie cast?

Lawrence Kelter: Both Ralph Macchio and his wife have both read the novel and reported that they really enjoyed it. I tried to get in touch with Joe and Marisa but was unsuccessful. On a lighter note, Nelson DeMille gave his copy of the book to his mother after he read it and she reported, "Nelson, this guy knows Brooklyn a hell of a lot better than you do!"

What are you working on now? Will we see further adventures with Vinny and Lisa?

Lawrence Kelter: I'm working on four or five new books at once. OMG, it's scary that I can't remember how many books I'm working on. They're all in different states of completion. Next up is (insert drumroll) the novelization of My Cousin Vinny. Why you ask? Because it's bigger, and fresher, with additional scenes, lots of new humor, and sneak peeks into Vinny and Lisa's history that was not revealed in the film. It's due for release in March of next year.

 
You can learn more about Lawrence Kelter on his official website and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.  Back to Brooklyn is available via Down & Out Books and from all major online and brick-and-mortar booksellers.

 

The 'Zine Scene

It's been a while since I had a roundup of the latest offerings of crime fiction and news in magazines (both print and digital), but I hope to rectify that with today's blog post - and another next week focusing on anthologies. So, without further ado, here they are (with a hat tip to Peter DiChellis, Sandra Seamans, and Martin Edwards):

The November/December issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine features some familiar characters: Special operative cum high-school principal Anne DeWitt returns in “Small Signs” by Charlaine Harris; Elizabeth Zelvin’s sleuth Bruce Kohler is back in a Central Park/Strawberry Fields whodunit (“Death Will Help You Imagine”); Lou Manfredo’s Detective Rizzo takes on a case with a bit of nostalgia (“Rizzo’s Monkey Store”); writer-sleuth Antonia Darcy again stumbles upon a body in “Murder at The Mongoose” by R.T. Raichev; and detectives Hennessey and Yellich return in Peter Turnbull’s procedural “Bad Bargain Lane.” The newcomers include Jim Fusilli, who has his Black Mask debut with the mob story “Precision Thinking,” and John Gastineau’s suspenseful Department of First Stories entry, “A Coon Dog and Love," plus there's much, much more from Dominic Russ-Combs, Tim L. Williams, Tom Tolnay, Penny Hancock, Frankie Y. Bailey, Richard Chizmar, Bill Pronzini, T. J. MacGregor, Zoë Z. Dean, and Doug Allyn.

The new issue of EQMM's sister publication Alfred Hithcock Mystery Magazine includes post-war Manhattan private investigator Memphis Red, who confronts shifting motivations, political alliances, and even identities in L. A. Wilson Jr.’s “Harlem Nocturne; a young woman tries to escape the consequences of a one-time lapse in judgment but finds she can’t escape those determined to find her in S. L. Franklin’s “Damsels in Distress"; and the shadow of calamity, in the form of drought, leaves a western town vulnerable to a charismatic, and dangerous, itinerant preacher in Gilbert Stack’s “Pandora’s Hoax.” There are also plenty of other stories that fit the issue's theme of a landscape of shadows offering many opportunities for both deception and misperception, including those from Eve Fisher, Robert S. Levinson, William Dylan Powell, Susan Oleksiw, Tara Laskowski, Robert Lopresti, R. T. Lawton, Carol Cail, and Anna Castle.The edition also features the second installment of the new feature The Case Files as Steve Hockensmith brings to light some cutting-edge mystery-related podcasts.

I announced this earlier in a Mystery Melange, but it's worth repeating here: Spinetingler Magazine announced it will begin regular publication of a print magazine with the first issue due November 2017 by Down & Out Books. "As is true in life, the events of the past have a tendency to influence our actions in the future," said Sandra Ruttan, co-editor of Spinetingler. "It is the support of our readers that has enabled us to return with this print edition. With their continued support we hope to be able to continue to bring exceptional short fiction and features to you for years to come." The Fall 2017 edition will feature original stories by Tracy Falenwolfe, Karen Montin, Jennifer Soosar, Nick Kolakowski, David Rachels, and yours truly. There are also author snapshots of Con Lehane, Rusty Barnes, Mindy Tarquini, as well as book features and reviews.

Spinetingler is not the only foray into the crime magazine field from Down and Out Books, which also publishes Crimespree, as it just recently launched a new digest, Down & Out, The Magazine, edited by Rick Ollerman. Reed Farrel Coleman contributed an original Moe Prager story, and the editors promise that each issue will feature a story based on a series character. There are also new tales by established and well-known writers including Eric Beetner, Michael A. Black, Jen Conley, Terrence McCauley, Rick Ollerman, and Thomas Pluck. J. Kingston Pierce, fresh off his former beat from Kirkus Reviews, also introduces “Placed in Evidence,” his non-fiction column, and the zine will answer the question of what happened to crime fiction after Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler moved on from the pulps in the essay “A Few Cents a Word.”

The latest issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine (#23) from Wildside Press includes new stories and features by Dan Andriacco, Henry W. Enberg, Steve Liskow, Laird Long, Robert Lopresti, Gary Lovisi, David Marcum, Kim Newman, and a classic tale from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, himself. SHMM is a go-to favorite for tales in the more traditional, Holmesian vein.

The latest Mystery Weekly Magazine features the cover story, “The Sugar Witch” by R.S. Morgan, as well as new short fiction from Joseph D’Agnese, Peter DiChellis, Stef Donati, Debra H. Goldstein, R.S. Morgan, Edward Palumbo, Tom Tolnay, and David Vardeman. Mystery Weekly bills itself as offering up every imaginable subgenre, including cozy, police procedural, noir, whodunit, supernatural, hardboiled, humor, and historical mysteries.

Flash Bang Mysteries, edited by BJ Bourg, publishes mystery and crime flash fiction quarterly online, in January, April, July, and October, with a mission to showcase "stories that feature believable characters who speak naturally, realistic situations that bleed conflict, and surprise endings that stay with us long after we reach the final period." The latest issue includes new work by Michael Bracken, Larry W. Chavis, Herschel Cozine, John M. Floyd, and Earl Staggs.

The only American scholarly journal for crime fiction, Clues, has published its latest issues (35.2) in both print form, which can be ordered from McFarland, and digital, available on Kindle and Google Play. As noted in the introduction by executive editor Janice M. Allan, this edition includes analyses of works by E. C. Bentley, Benjamin Black, Andrea Camilleri, Leslie Charteris, Agatha Christie, Tana French, Dashiell Hammett, and Herman Melville, and the TV series True Detective. There are also reviews of nonfiction works in the genre, including Out of Deadlock: Female Emancipation in Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski Novels and Her Influence on Contemporary Crime Fiction (Enrico Minardi and Jennifer Byron, eds.) and Susanna Lee's Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority.

The latest issue of CADS (Crime and Detective Stories), Geoff Bradley's "irregular magazine of comment and criticism about crime and detective fiction," includes an article on "Serendip’s Detections XVI: Disjecta Membra by Tony Medawar," the first attempt to provide a definitive and accurate overview of all the unpublished material featuring Lord Peter Wimsey; a look at "Two and Nearly Three, Crime Classics by Andrew Garve" by Pete Johnson; and "Women Detectives in Fiction: The Early Period" by Philip L. Scowcroft, who explores Sayers’ comments on female detectives. (HT to Cross Examining Crime and Martin Edwards)

The third issue of Crime Syndicate Magazine is out with ten fantastic crime fiction short stories from some of the top crime writers on the market today. Guest-edited by Eryk Pruitt, this issue follows its mission of publishing hard-hitting crime fiction of stories "about violence, greed, lust, debauchery, and any combination," from drugged-outmarital problems in the East Texas countryside (Eryk Pruitt's own "The Deplorables") to helping a new college bestie murder a New Orleans local "god" (Nina Mansfield's "Gods and Virgins in the Big Easy"). There are additional offerings from Kevin Z. Garvey, Max Booth, Dennis Day, S.A. Cosby, Travis Richardson, Paul Heatley, Allen Griffin, and David A. Anthony.

Noir Nation No. 6 continues the crime noir tradition by circling back to its 20th Century jazz roots. This issue includes contributions from 14 writers, including "oldtimer" Gary Phillips, and Tatiana Eva-Marie, who is publishing her first story, who use their stories to address "jazz and crime, jazz and temptation, and the startling impulses that give them life and genius." Other stories in the issue hail from JC Hopkins, Tigre Galindo, Tatiana Eva Marie, John Goldbach, Brendan DuBois, Geronimo Horowitz, Gary Phillips, Jonas Kyle, Andrey Henkin, Alfredo Meridee, Jackie Goodwin, and Ted Berg, and Bill Moody.

In case you missed it, the first issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine was launched into the crime fiction universe. The brainchild of Wildside Press publisher John Betancourt and Wildside editor Carla Coupe, the magazine is expected to come out quarterly. The inaugural issue features new stories from Alan Orloff, Art Taylor, Josh Pachter, Barb Goffman, Meg Opperman, Dan Andriacco, John M. Floyd, Jack Halliday, Michael Bracken, Kaye George, James Holding, and Fletcher Flora.

The most recent issue of Mysterical-E features new short fiction by Rosemary and Larry Mild, Rafe McGregor, Leslie Budewitz, Sam Wiebe, Robert Watts Lamon, Justin A. McWhirter, Peter W. J. Hayes, Rita A. Popp, Summer Theron , Andrew Miller, Bern Sy Moss, J. R. Lindermuth, and Leroy B. Vaughn. Plus, Gerald So has his latest "Mysterical-Eye on TV and FIlm" column, Christine Verstraete talks up characters, and Frances G. Thorsen looks at classic crime novels. And there are the usual interviews and reviews.

July/August issue of Suspense Magazine has interviews with Peter James, Tess Gerritsen, Linda Fairstein, Sandra Brown, Brenda Novak, and Jeff Menapace. There's also a new section by bestselling author Alan Jacobson, with “The Writer’s Toolkit," and Dennis Palumbo writes a great article about "Rejection." Plus, Anthony Franze and Barry Lancet's "Rules of Writing with J.A Jance"; D.P. Lyle's Forensic Files; and pages of book reviews and short stories.


The most recent Mystery Readers Journal, "Big City Cops I" has "Author Author" features from Max Allan Collins, J.T. Ellison, Margaret Maron and more, including three that are available online: "Cops These Days Aren’t What They Used To Be" by Rennie Airth; "Chinatown Crime Time" by Henry Chang; and "Are You Feeling Safe?" by Lyndsay Faye. There are also new reviews from Lesa Holstine, Michael Mayo, L.J. Roberts, and Craig Sisterson, and more.

Brian Stoddart is Professor Emeritus at La Trobe University where he served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) and as Vice-Chancellor. He took his first two degrees at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand where he first became interested in India, then completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia that looked at the rise of nationalism in south India. Along with his work on India, Brian has been a pioneering writer in sports culture and has produced books on Australian sport, Caribbean cricket and other related subjects. In addition, Brian Stoddart writes the Superintendent Le Fanu crime fiction series set in British India. A Madras Miasma and The Pallampur Predicament attracted excellent reviews and recognition while the third, A Straits Settlement, was longlisted for the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award for best New Zealand crime novel.

In A Straits Settlement, the third installment of the Chris Le Fanu Mystery series, the intrepid superintendent is promoted to Inspector-General of Police in 1920s Madras, which proves to be more boring than he had envisaged. Instead of pushing papers across his desk, Le Fanu focuses on the disappearance of a senior Indian Civil Service officer and an apparently unrelated murder. As the two incidents intertwine, the world-weary detective is drawn into the worlds of indentured labor recruitment and antiquities theft.

Brian Stoddart stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and research his novels: 

 

Looking For Le Fanu

When the first book in the Chris Le Fanu series appeared, many readers loved its atmospherics of 1920s Madras in colonial India, and the city itself being as much a character as the protagonist and his colleagues on both sides of the crime fence. Even the Madras/Chennai media critics thought I had it “right”, a source of great satisfaction.

All those readers marvelled at the research behind the book and its successors, wondering how I had done it all.

Well, I cheated, in a sense.

I began writing, badly, at school in New Zealand, then went to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch to become an historian. Two things that happened back then now mark the Le Fanu series. First, I began re-reading all my sports books as an historian, realising that since the later nineteenth century sport has had a deep and meaningful impact on life globally. That began my pioneering sports history and culture work, but also determined that Le Fanu be a golfer and one of his assistants a cricketer. They reference that intellectual journey.

The second impact was even bigger. In first year I took a course in Pacific and Asian History at its first time of offering. That began a lifelong fascination with Asia. Then I took a specialist intensive course on modern India with Ian Catanach, one of those teachers and mentors who change your life. That led to a Masters degree, a fixation with India, and a high school teaching job. A year later Ian engineered a PhD scholarship for me at the University of Western Australia where I began researching the growth of nationalist politics in south India.

That research put me physically into what was then still called Madras, now renamed Chennai, and indirectly began the Le Fanu story thread. By the time I got there, I “knew” the city, its suburbs, streets, highlights and lowlights because I had studied it so closely. When I got off the ship in the Port of Madras, I knew where to go despite never having been there before. Years later I had the same sensation in Venice, “knowing” the place simply from having read Donna Leon.

I spent months then, over time, years in the Madras archives opposite Egmore Railway Station, ransacking files that recounted clashes between nationalists and police, and the ruminations of British Raj officials  trying to handle it all. By definition I learned about police processes, methods, thinking and organisation in the British India context. That included the evolving, difficult relations between European officers and Indian other ranks.

Fortuitously, the archival work was supplemented by an important personal one. By complete chance the patriarch in the house where I stayed turned out to have been one of the first Indian Inspectors-General of Police in post-Independence Madras, and began his career during the period I was studying. So every night I returned to the house, sat outside and discussed the files I had been reading while he reminisced about being amidst the action.

My thesis was not about the police but I read everything possible on the Indian Police Service, an academic colleague wrote a book on the Madras Presidency police service that graced my shelves alongside a growing line of Indian police histories and autobiographies.

Then I went off and write about sport but retained the interest in India. A string of academically-oriented works followed, but that police interest remained while I read all the crime fiction I could for fun. Eventually I wrote the biography of an Indian Civil Service maverick, something I thought I would never do. Then came a memoir of living in Damascus just before the start of the present troubles, another literary form I had thought beyond me.

I never thought to write fiction, either, but with time to spare on foreign assignment in Cambodia, instead of reading crime fiction I decided to write some, so Le Fanu emerged.

At one level I followed that rubric of “write what you know”. I had always considered India a great potential crime fiction site for both historical and contemporary settings. All that research from all those archives and conversations was still sitting there, I “knew” Madras. My Indian Civil Service biography sprang the idea of having someone “odd” as protagonist to set up tensions and complexities. A Le Fanu had been in the Indian Civil Service in Madras during the nineteenth century and, of course, there was the twist provided by Sheridan Le Fanu who had rivalled Edgar Alan Poe as a mystery writer. Besides, a Le Fanu had also played rugby for England, so there was another strand.

While I returned physically to Madras, as I still call the place, to “see” it again as a crime setting, the Le Fanu cases, locations, combatants and all the rest were just there waiting to be disinterred. Some of the characters are even real historical ones, while the main “fictionalised” ones all have people and personalities discovered long ago lurking in behind.

Strictly speaking, then, years of research sits behind Chris Le Fanu. But the passage of time has allowed me to re-approach that research more dispassionately, allowing the story and stories to take precedence rather than that research. As people say, the biggest problem is that having done all that “research” you feel compelled to use it. That is less of a problem for me now because even though I am revisiting it, the research has settled in my mind.

The great bonus? A lot more people like Le Fanu than read the thesis on which he is based! 

 

You can learn more about the author and his books (both fiction and nonfiction) via his website or follow him on Facebook and Twitter. His crime novels are available from Crimewave Press and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Elka Ray

Elka Ray is a Canadian/UK author and editor, whose first novel, Hanoi Jane, was published by Marshall Cavendish in English and DT Books in Vietnamese. That was followed by the suspense novel, Saigon Dark, which came out with Crimewave Press in November 2016, as well as a collection of short crime stories, What You Don’t Know: Tales of Obsession, Mystery & Murder in Southeast Asia. Elka is also the author and illustrator of a popular series of bilingual children’s books about Vietnam and lives with her family near Hoi An.

Elka stops by In Reference to Murder to today to take some Author R&R and talk a bit about her writing:

My childhood was nomadic. No stranger to homesickness, I looked forward to growing up - and being in control of where I lived. As a result, place is important to me, both in life and in fiction. 

Looking back on books I read long ago, the settings often remain clearer to me than the plots - that misty graveyard in Dickens' Great Expectations, the ominously dark Canadian lakes of Andrew Pyper's Lost Girls, the secret passages of Hogwarts in J.K Rowling's Harry Potter series... Little annoys me more than a book set in a place I know well and the author clearly doesn't. 

The three books I've published so far - Hanoi Jane, Saigon Dark and What You Don't Know: Tales of Obsession, Mystery & Murder in Southeast Asia - are all set in Southeast Asia, where I've lived for over 20 years. As a journalist and travel writer I used to cover a fair bit of ground. All these stories take place in spots I've lived, worked or holidayed. 

My crime/romance novel Newly Wed, Nearly Dead will be published by Seventh Street in early 2019. It's set in another place I know well, on Canada's beautiful Vancouver Island.

I once tried to set part of a story in a country I'd never been - Syria, I think it was. I read news reports and travel blogs. I watched Youtube videos. I googled everything from the weather  in July to the smell in the market to the most common boys' and girls' names. I quizzed friends who'd worked there.

The scene sounded authentic - at least to me, who'd never been near the place. But how would I know? I ended up scrapping it. 

I write fiction by instinct and fear too much research will bog me down. If I know the setting, I trust the story will fall into place - and the internet is there for the rest. Imagine having to go to the library and pore through dusty encyclopedias to confirm place names or the most popular bands in 1977. Imagine lugging home heavy medical textbooks to find appropriate causes of death. Google is both a writer's best friend and potential worst enemy, providing the ultimate excuse to procrastinate. Divorce law in Canada. Fast acting poisons. Fatal head wounds. How long until human hair rots away.

I hope I'm never connected to a real crime as the police would have a field day with my internet history. 

 

You can read more about Elka and her books on her website at www.elkaray.com, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter or at elka.ray on Instagram. Elka's book Saigon Dark is available from Crimewave Press and via all major booksellers.

Author R&R with David Malcolm

David Malcolm was born in Aberdeen and educated in Ab­erdeen, Zürich, and London. He's lived and worked in Japan, the USA, and currently calls Sopot, Poland home, where he is professor at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk. His collection of short fiction, Radio Moscow and Other Stories, was published by Blackwitch Press in 2015 and republished by Artizan in 2016.

His new novel, The German Messenger (Crime Wave Press) is set in late 1916 when Europe is tearing itself apart in the Great War. Harry Draffen, a part Greek and part Scottish British secret agent, becomes part of a daring attempt by British and German spies to stop the gratuitous bloodletting of WWI. Draffen journeys from the slums of East London to an Oxford college, from the trenches on the Western Front to an isolated house on the Scottish coast, and then on to a bloody showdown in the North of England, to chase a phantom and elusive German messenger.


David Malcolm stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and researching the novel:

 

Most of the fiction that I write is set in the past. I find the past – places, people, events – much more interesting than the present. The German Messenger is set in late 1916 and early 1917. I’ve also written other crime stories that take place during the Great War or in the early 1950s.

The problem for me is not so much the grand historical events. They can be tricky however. For example, like many even moderately well-read people, I had heard very little of the Salonika campaign in which the British Army was involved, alongside Allied forces, between 1915 and 1918. It was complicated, bloody, not very successful – and largely forgotten. I realized as I was writing The German Messenger that my hero Draffen – because he is part-Greek – has to have been involved somehow in it. I may have to juggle with time-lines in sequels to the Messenger.

However, the grand events are not so much a problem. It’s the smaller details that a writer setting stories in the past  also needs to get right. Exactly how short were women’s skirts in 1917? Did British officers wear uniforms to civilian dinner parties in 1916? What did a Habsburg infantry unit look like in 1915? (The answer to that is: in field-grey, very tough, and very scary.) How were train carriages laid out in southern England in the winter of 1916 (with a corridor running the length of the carriage, or with doors opening directly on to the platform)? The problem is not just with the distant past. How much had Hamburg been rebuilt by 1951? What did that part of Warsaw look like in 1953? What was it like to be in that kind of bar in Tokyo in 1984?

But of course there are loads of books and magazines in libraries, and many that you can get to read at home if you haven’t got the British Library twenty minutes down the road. (I am very jealous of those who do.) For example, I have collections of wonderful pictures of the third arrondissement in Paris that give you a sense of the streets there from 1900 through 1940. A book that I looked at by chance in the British Library contains a railway map of the Baltic area in 1908, so I now know how my hero gets from Warsaw to Reval/Tallinn. Books, too, give you ideas for stories. Alex Butterworth’s splendid The World That Never Was  tells you more about the anarchists and the policemen of Europe between 1870 and 1914 than you probably ever wanted to know. (In fact, it’s a very depressing book – folly on all sides.) Do you need to write a novel about the Habsburg secret services? Have a look at Albert Pethö’s Agenten für den Doppeladler (Agents for the Double-Eagle). It has the kernels of more plots than you can shake a stick at. Museums, too, can be of assistance, and can inspire. A visit to the marvelous Nissim de Camondo museum in Paris gave me the background to a whole subplot for the next German Messenger novel.

Zoppot 1910 Plan

Then there’s the internet. Pictures everywhere. Snippets of stories. Maps. Street plans of Zoppot in 1902. Fashion pictures. Film of Hamburg streets in 1955. It’s almost like being there sometimes. It’s not cheating at all. If only it had all been there twenty years ago.

But sometimes, of course, you just invent. When I wrote a thriller set in Japan in the 1980s, I decided I might as well invent the bar where the hero meets an important female character. I had lived in Tokyo for two years, so I had lots of surrounding details right. But I’d never been to that kind of bar. I couldn’t do the local research, and – to be honest – I didn’t want to. I don’t care for that kind of place, and it’s wise to know your limitations. So I imagined it. European and American readers who’ve looked at the typescript say it’s completely authentic and believable. I haven’t dared show it to any Japanese ones. I did the same in The German Messenger with The Cherry Tree nightclub (do all my stories take place in bars, you ask). I made it up. When I read it again, I think to myself even – how authentic! But I believe the author should do that kind of invention very sparingly. All fictions are precisely that – fictions. But you owe, I believe, a debt to reality, to the past, to the people of the past, and you should do your best to get it right. I try. For readers, too, there has to be a certain density of historical detail to make the story feel real (not too much, not too little). The most accurate is usually the best.

Fortunately, I love libraries. My work has taken me to some of the best in the world. I’m very happy in them, even in indifferent ones. But the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, and Warsaw give you ideas, give you settings, make you imagine. They’re kinds of libraries too. Dusty second-hand bookstores in provincial cities, too, are still sources of ideas, atmosphere, details.

Photograph copyright Jennifer Zielinska

Then there is serendipity. I was in Łódź (Lodz in German, Russian, and Yiddish) a couple of years ago in a second-hand bookstore (also one of my favorite places, as you can guess). I bought a book about Łódż in the Great War, and the bookseller said to me, “Oh, my grandmother was a girl during the First War.” She remembered one of the first battles of the War that was fought around the city. The local bourgeoisie stood out on the roof of the Grand Hotel on the main street and watched as the Russians and Germans lobbed shells at each other from either side of the city. Who could invent that?

 

Find out more about David Malcolm and his books via the Crime Wave Press site and Amazon. The German Messenger is now available from all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Rich Zahradnik

Rich Zahradnik was a journalist for 30-plus years working as a reporter and editor in all major news media, including online, newspaper, broadcast, magazine and wire services. He held editorial positions at CNN, Bloomberg News, Fox Business Network, AOL and The Hollywood Reporter. He's also the author of the Coleridge Taylor Mystery series (A Black Sail, Drop Dead Punk, Last Words). The first three books in the series were shortlisted or won awards in the three major competitions for books from independent publishers. A Black Sail was named best mystery in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and a finalist in the 2016 Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Awards. Drop Dead Punk collected the gold medal for mystery ebook in the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards, while Last Words won the bronze medal for mystery/thriller ebook in the 2015 IPPYs and honorable mention for a mystery in the Foreword Reviews competition.

The latest series installment, Lights Out Summer (Camel Press), is set in March 1977, when ballistics link murders going back six months to the same Charter Arms Bulldog .44, and a serial killer, Son of Sam, is on the loose. But Coleridge Taylor can’t compete with the armies of reporters fighting New York’s tabloid war—only rewrite what they get. Constantly on the lookout for victims who need their stories told, he uncovers other killings being ignored because of the media circus. He goes after one, the story of a young Black woman gunned down in her apartment building the same night Son of Sam struck elsewhere in Queens. The story entangles Taylor with a wealthy Park Avenue family at war with itself. Just as he’s closing in on the killer and his scoop, the July 13-14 blackout sends New York into a 24-hour orgy of looting and destruction.

Rich stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and research Lights Out Summer:

 

Researching the Coleridge Taylor Mysteries changed in a big way in 2014—in both interesting and embarrassing fashion. Sometime before then, I’d put on my gift list the massive “The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2009.” The tome included three DVDs—remember those?—containing 54,693 front pages linking to complete articles.

Taylor is a reporter who always has an acute awareness of the other stories going on around him. He reacts to news and how it’s covered even when it’s not his story. The novels are set in the seventies. From a storytelling standpoint, a headline from a certain day can give readers a feel for the period—or remind them of a crime or political event or cultural incident they’d forgotten and perhaps echoes what’s happening today.

Right, so that’s why I needed the book. My wife gave it to me for Hanukkah. The cost of the giant thing was somewhere between $125 and $165. Within months, the New York Times announced online subscribers would have access to TimesMachine, an online archive of complete issues of the paper as they originally appeared going back to 1865. I never did put one of those DVDs into my computer. You can now buy the DVD/book package on Amazon for $8.27.

I am well past my embarrassment. (The Times could have given me some warning, though.) TimesMachine is indispensible. I can go deeper to see the stories beyond the front page. The ads, too. This helps for all the reasons I mentioned above. And others. My new mystery, Lights Out Summer, is set in 1977 and an important set piece in the plot is the New York blackout of July 13-14. No book was written about those terrible 25 hours when thousands of businesses were looted and destroyed. But I could read all of the articles the Times published during and in the aftermath of the stealing, fires and vandalism. (The Times itself pulled off a miracle by sending editors over to Jersey and getting the paper out.) I’ll admit, the TimesMachine is particularly helpful to me because my books are set in New York, so I can track local politics, cultural and crime. Tidbits are sprinkled throughout the novels.

Each of my books involves a major New York historical event in the plot: the city’s near bankruptcy, the Bicentennial celebrations, Son of Sam’s murder spree. And for each, I’ve found at least a couple of books to go deep on the subject even if the event—like the Bicentennial—serves as a backdrop to the crime story. For “Lights Out Summer,” I was greatly aided by “Son of Sam: Based on the Authorized Transcription of the Tapes, Official Documents and Diaries of David Berkowitz” by Lawrence D. Klausner and “Son of Sam: The .44 Caliber Killer” by George Carpozi Jr. I learned of an earlier New York serial killer, 3X, from the wonderful “Police Reporter: Forty Years One of New York’s Finest Reporters” by Ted Prager. That book also gave me insights into what Taylor’s job was like for one or two generations of reporters before him.

A collection of general histories, timelines and atlases of New York rounds out my library.

Oh, and one last reference is indispensible: “Billboard Top 10 Singles Charts, 1955 to 2000.” Music triggers memories in readers. The seventies were a period of massive change as disco, punk, hairband rock and the sixties survivors fought for listeners’ attention. I could easily pick out a song I remember from 1977 and drop it in. But the charts show me what tunes were hot in a particular week—adding a nice level of detail. They also remind me of songs and bands I’d forgotten.

Disco-Tex and the x-O-Lettes anyone?

You can learn more about Rich and his books via his website and follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads. Lights Out Summer is available via all major book retailers.

Author R&R with Rebecca Marks

An attorney, musician, and owner of dog-show champion Belgian Tervurens, Rebecca Marks is also the author of the Dana Cohen Mystery Series, which deal with a woman who has retired at age 42 from her post as detective with the NYPD and relocated to the North Fork of Long Island. She plans on helping her elderly father manage his winery but soon finds she can't stop solving mysteries. Following the first two installments, On the Rocks and Four Shots Neat, she's just released the third book in the series, Stone Cold Sober, from Black Opal Books.

In the novel, Dana's best friend, Marilyn, is directing a local musical theater production. Dana's estranged lover, Alex Frasier, the father of the child she's carrying, is a Morris dancer in the show, but Dana has no theatrical talent at all. So Marilyn cooks up a way to get the two former lovebirds together, hiring Dana to work security for the production. When Dana discovers a gruesome murder during one of the show's rehearsals, her "detective gene" overtakes her, and she can't resist the urge to throw herself into this case. But as she investigates, she uncovers some dark secrets and realizes, too late, how far someone will go to keep them hidden...

Rebecca stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing her books:

 

In our current culture, sophisticated readers have access to the most updated information about most everything, and they are not shy about finding the information and complaining about errors. So I’ve always felt that it’s very important to make sure that as an author, I do my homework and research all of the parts of the story that entail factual legal procedures. In a mystery, it’s common to talk about police work, legal process, and much of what happens between the crime and the solution.

Although I am a Massachusetts lawyer, I have never been licensed to practice in New York, and the rules and procedures can vary greatly from state to state. The Dana Cohen mystery series takes place entirely in New York. So I followed several different routes to ensure that I got the facts right.

First of all, Google has been a tremendously important tool for me. There is a great deal of information posted online by the state of New York, detailing police procedure, court process, medical examiner rules, and grand jury proceedings, to name a few. I read extensively about all of the following: 

• Police conduct legal searches, but to do so, they need the proper warrants and implements to conduct their searches. The Consolidated Laws of New York’s CPL code provide all of the information about what property police can seize during a search, who and what are subject to such search, when the warrants are executable, and how they are obtained, to name a few of the procedures.
• Because Dana operates mostly in Suffolk County, I consulted the Suffolk County Government Medical Examiner website. It provides extensive information about how the ME operates in Suffolk County, including timing, autopsy policy, and when the ME is called in.
• Grand juries are convened by the county prosecutor to ascertain whether the perpetrator of a crime should be indicted. Although these procedures are similar from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, I researched how it works in Suffolk County, to make sure I didn’t write something that wasn’t true. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office provides complete information about criminal justice procedures, which were invaluable to me in writing Dana’s stories.
• Finally, court cases also follow the procedure of the jurisdiction where the crime occurred, and New York publishes extensive articles about how criminal procedure works in that state. Luckily, my law background enabled me to understand the gist of the NYS CPL Law Code.

In addition to the rich availability of information on the Internet, there are other extremely useful tools out there for authors to use in the quest to do accurate research. There are several Yahoo groups that provide useful information volunteered by other authors who have already done the research. I have found that the Yahoo group “Crimescene Writer” is extremely useful. On that site, writers can ask questions about absolutely everything they might be planning to write about in their crime novels. Recently, someone asked about a gunshot wound, and how it would affect a victim. Many people answered this question and provided information about where to learn more. There are reports about how the FBI operates, what police do, what is legal and illegal for the police, warrants, and any other questions an author might have about their book.

I have asked several questions of this group in the course of my writing the Dana Cohen mystery series, and I always receive excellent information. Then I am able to refine that information even more carefully by digging into its accuracy.

Finally, there are several organizations that support mystery writers, and I am a member of two of those: Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and International Thriller Writers (ITW). These organizations provide not only a venue for writers to meet other writers, but also give members a place to seek relevant information. 

Research is not only interesting and fun, but doing it thoroughly gives me the confidence that although I am writing fiction, the procedures and actions of agencies involved in my mysteries are correct and believable. 

 

You can learn more about Rebecca and her books via her website, or follow her on Twitter or on Facebook.

 

Author R&R with Jack Getze

Former Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Getze is Fiction Editor for Anthony nominated Spinetingler Magazine. Through the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Syndicate, his news and feature stories have been published in over five-hundred newspapers and periodicals worldwide. His screwball mysteries, Big Numbers and Big Money, were first published by Hilliard Harris in 2007 and 2008, and Big Mojo was published by Down & Out Books in 2013. His short stories have appeared in A Twist of Noir and Beat to a Pulp.

In his new book, The Black Kachina, a top-secret weapon goes missing on Colonel Maggie Black’s watch putting her honor and career on the line. There were airmen who said the Air Force’s best female combat pilot would never be the same after losing her arm in Iraq, but state-of-the-art prosthetics have made Maggie better than new, and she’s not about to lose what she battled so hard to regain.

But finding her experimental missile won’t be easy—thanks to the revenge-fueled ambitions of Asdrubal Torres, whose hallucinatory encounter with the Great Spirit challenges him to refill Lake Cahuilla, the ancient inland sea that once covered much of southern California. To fulfill his mission, Torres needs wizardry and weaponry, and the Great Spirit provides both: Magic, in the form of a celebrated shaman’s basket returned to the tribal museum by San Diego reporter Jordan Scott; Might, in the form of Maggie Black’s top-secret weapon that falls from the sky.

From that moment on, it’s a race against time for Maggie and Jordan, who together must stop Torres from destroying Hoover Dam—and turning the Colorado River into a tsunami that would kill hundreds of thousands and wipe out the Southwest’s water supply. In the final showdown, it’s Maggie who must disarm the stolen missile’s trigger—one-handed or not—and save the day.

Getze stops by In Reference today to talk about researching and writing The Black Kachina:

 

It wasn’t always so, but today my writing and research are locked together like new lovers. Mostly because of today’s search engines, curiosity and fact-finding lead the whole creative process. In addition to the ever-present dictionary and thesaurus (now online of course), I keep a window open with Google ready while I write. Very few pages of an early draft pass without checking something on the internet.

Certainly what interests me has always found its way into my stories. And those events, objects, or people who’ve interested me the most have ended up carrying the tale. But my older Austin Carr novels were written in the first person and centered around my miserable, imaginary, and post-journalism life as a bond salesman, mixing wild stories with true events and real people. I didn’t do much research. Maybe a couple of questions to my wife about pantyhose.

I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s by twisting the truth, squeezing out a narrative to entertain myself. As an ex-newspaper reporter, I’d learned to do fact-checking in the library and courthouse, in person, or on the telephone. Who had time for all that, writing first-person fiction? But with the ease of online research, now I get even more jollies basing my fiction on fact. Honest. I always had the curiosity, but the internet has made research so much simpler.

I made this transition during the decades-long, instructive creation of The Black Kachina, my new thriller, which after seven or eight different versions is by now almost completely a product of curiosity and research. I hardly made up anything but the overall premise.

The book came to life in 1994 when I saw a colorful image of Nataska, the Black Ogre, a Hopi kachina, or spirit. Kachinas are portrayed most often as dolls for sale to tourists, or as costumed tribesmen dancing in ceremonies. As one of the Hopi’s “black ogres,” Nataska is known as The Punisher of Wicked Children, and tales of his deeds supposedly frighten Hopi kids into good behavior. My curiosity demanded knowledge about that spirit, and back when I started, that meant buying or renting books and reading. I sucked up all I could about kachinas and the various Cahuilla tribes of Southern California. The story always has featured a half-breed who wants revenge against the white man.

I spent two decades researching, rewriting, researching, improving my craft, writing four, first person Austin Carr novels, and finally more military research. I own a small library of books about -- and by -- Native Americans, B-52 bombers, desert terrain, the flora and fauna. I wanted to walk the same ground as my characters so I traveled to California and spent a week in the deserts around the Salton Sea. I hiked through California’s Imperial sand dunes where they filmed parts of Star Wars and other movies. I visited a military airport and gunnery range. I walked alone in the desert with no sound but the wind brushing my ears. I visited several Cahuilla reservations and sacred sites. In short, I performed my early research the way I’d approached my past career of journalism. Hands on; person-to-person.

“Indian, Native American, and First American are all the white man’s words,” one Cahuilla spokesman told me. “Don’t worry about it. It says Cahuilla Indians on the sign above this trailer.”

But there was always more research to do, especially when writing teachers pointed out serious flaws; again when two agents agreed -- at different times of course -- to represent the novel if changes were made; and once more when a publishing industry editor requested a different protagonist. I had to learn a lot more about female combat pilots, and that’s when I grew especially fond of Google. I found dozens of feature stories on the only gender banned from flying combat missions until 1993; tales and background about their education, craft, diverse lives and experiences.

In summary, my novels grow inside like benign tumors, beginning with an external scratch, bite, or bruise, an irritation-by-information that develops internally -- pressing against flesh and bone until it’s enough of an aggravation to force removal. (Yeah, I don’t like the analogy either. The word tumor never sounds good, benign or not. But at least the expression conveys the kind of urgency I feel when it’s time to write that particular story.) I always have a couple of tales brewing, and when one needs to be written, the thing almost hurts, a tormenting sense of desperation to write the story.

I’m waiting for the research to kick up something as urgent and magic as that first meeting with Nataska; waiting to see which story gives me that nasty pain I can’t ignore.

 

You can read more about Jack Getze and The Black Kachina via Down & Out Books and also follow Jack on Twitter and on Facebook. The Black Kachina is currently available via all major digital and print bookstores.

Author R&R with Michael Pronko

Michael Pronko has won numerous awards for his three collections of writings about life in Tokyo. He has written about Japanese culture, art, jazz, society, architecture, and politics for Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, Artscape Japan, as well as other venues. He has appeared on NHK and Nippon Television and runs his own website, Jazz in Japan. He teaches American Literature and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and after class wanders Tokyo contemplating its intensity.

His most recent novel is The Last Train, a mystery-thriller set in Tokyo. (The second in the series, Japan Hand, will be out in February 2018.) When The Last Train opens, Hiroshi Shimizu is perfectly settled into his life investigating white-collar crime in Tokyo. But after an American businessman turns up dead, Hiroshi’s mentor Takamatsu drags him out to the notorious and intriguing hostess clubs and futuristic skyscraper offices of Tokyo in search of a possible killer. When Takamatsu goes missing, Hiroshi teams up with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi as they scour Tokyo’s sacred temples, corporate offices, and industrial wastelands to find out where Takamatsu went and why an average-seeming woman could have been driven to murder. The novel takes an intense look at the nuances of Japanese interpersonal relationships and the power dynamics of gender roles and how women—and men, too—are treated in this ancient society.

Michael stops by In Reference to Murder today to discuss the book and how he goes about researching: 

 

As a writer, I don’t, thankfully, suffer from writer’s block, but I do sometimes suffer from research blockade. That’s the moment where I have to stop to find out what I need to know before I can go forward. That’s not a bad thing, but a natural and necessary part of creating a narrative. Writing my first Hiroshi detective novel, The Last Train, research blockade often put a hold on production to focus on content.

Even though I’ve lived in Tokyo for twenty years, it was sometimes impossible to produce clear, strong sentences (i.e. a “form”) without knowing certain cultural and non-cultural details (i.e. “content”). For example, I can’t elegantly and succinctly describe what a machine lathe looks like without looking at one. I can’t describe a night in a net café without knowing the cost, and I can’t put in a fatal wound without looking at images of a sword cut. I think of research as finding the right content to fill out and improve the form.

It would be nice if all research could be done ahead of time, but it rarely works like that for me. Working on Japan Hand, the second in the Hiroshi series, I first read extensively about America’s military bases in Japan and the history of Japan and America’s military alliance. But, that was not enough. Small details still needed to be checked and added while writing. I can’t just load up the research cart and let it flow. It’s a back and forth process.  

Ongoing research, as I think of it, is not just information about history, dates, or facts, though. It involves much more. To me, in addition to the background textual and informational input, research involves different kinds of content: experience, sensory details, specialized and arcane knowledge, and a lot of self-examination. All these are necessary to produce a good, solid base of research upon which to build prose with energy and clarity and believability.

Experiential research

I love to stand and look and feel places. Since Tokyoites rarely do that, I often look a bit foolish, but that’s OK. It takes time to sink in. Other experiences can be difficult and expensive. An evening at a hostess club can set you back a week’s salary. But to not experience firsthand what it’s like to have beautiful women pouring your drinks and making small talk is to not have done the research. (And for the record, it’s very weird.) For other experiences, like ramen noodle restaurants, I like to sit at the counter slurping and imagining the novel’s characters there. All that ‘research’ soaks into your unconscious and influences the writing of scene, setting, character, and conflict. Other experiential research can be pure chance. I came across the cleaning up of a train suicide twenty years ago. That experience stayed with me and became part of the novel.

Sensory research

This is similar to experiential, but more focused. I often take photos of places I’ll use in my novels. I also search for photos of specific things online. Sensory details put readers in a place and make them feel it more deeply. The smell of a canal, the texture of a rusted staircase, the taste of sake—if I see an image of it, I can more easily conjure it in words. The real world is a hard thing to describe, but sensory input can make a scene come alive, or in the case of a murder scene, become dead. Looking online for photographs or images of places or objects often spurs my sensory memory. That may not seem like research in the traditional sense, but sensory impressions can be as powerful as historical facts.

Specialized research

For my novel Japan Hand, the killer uses a short sword. So, I wanted to experience a sword in person, which was terrifying. I also did a lot of traditional research, like reading the history of swords in Japan, and texts of swordsmen like Takuan Soho and Miyamoto Musashi. But that potentially passive history of swords and theory of swordsmanship was activated by experiencing swords up close. I also ask people who know. One of my friends who studied aikido for decades dropped me to the tatami when I asked him how you flip someone. He just twisted my arm—somehow—and I was down. And yes, it hurt. But, it made it clear how powerful martial arts are. Reading about it or watching a YouTube video doesn’t cause any pain.

Internal research

Inside everyone is a library of emotions, confusions, memories and reactive tendencies. Tapping into that internal catalogue helps to ground the story in an internal world as well as an external world. That can be difficult when a character is entirely different, like the killer in The Last Train, who is a Japanese woman from a working-class background working as a hostess. I’m none of those things, but to achieve emotional veracity, writers must look deeply inside themselves to find human truths and values. Though the protagonist is so different from me, she’s similar in her respect for hard working people, her outrage at unfairness, and her ability to trust herself. (Actually, she’s better at that self-trust thing than me). Except for intimate friends, where else could one research emotions and values except inside oneself?  

Over-research

With any kind of research, there’s the danger of over-research. I know much more about hostesses, swords, train schedules and making ramen (I helped on a couple programs for NHK TV) than I really care to. Research is always inefficient. You end up with too much detail and end up editing out the vast majority. But I think exclusion and editing are part of the writing process. You can’t use it all, but it’s important to know it, so you can choose what has the greatest impact from that research. Choosing well is as important as knowing a lot. As a professor of literature, I know just how to kill students’ interest—tell them everything. Research is more like a spice than the main meat.

Too fresh research

I think there’s also a danger with fresh research. When I started researching swords, I became so enthusiastic I’d write long paragraphs describing the details of the fittings, the way of polishing, the exact way to swing a sword, the long history and fascinating Zen theories. But do readers want to wade through all that? Of course not. Readers want their research contextualized, focused, clarified and juicy. I think researching needs to cure or ferment to have the right flavor.

Fermenting research

Research takes time to reveal its meanings. The researched information itself is maybe less important than the meanings and resonances of the information. When it’s in the conscious mind only, it can end up as an info dump. When it’s put into the unconscious mind, the relevance and deeper meaning of it comes out. Then, it can be succinctly delivered. Research mixed with character, feeling and story is meaningful. Research tends to push my mind into rational, cognitive mode, and I push back to get my mind into narrative flow mode.

Mystery novels draw a lot of their power from the tension of competing elements—researched and non-researched. It’s not knowing all the stops on a Tokyo train line, but setting a chase scene there. It’s not the economics of the night-time world of bars and clubs, but how that affects the characters. Research makes mystery novels gripping by mooring the story to reality. If well-done and thoughtfully included, the researched components keep the story humming with a strong pace, a sincere manner, a balance of emotions and a deep feeling for the world.

 

To find out more about Michael and his new book, The Last Train, check out his website and follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads. The book is available via Amazon and all major book retailers.