Author R&R with Raemi A. Ray

 

Raemi A. Ray is a Boston-based mystery author who enjoys taking inspiration from current New England events when writing about the region. She has a JD with a background in intellectual property and lives in Massachusetts with her two house demons, Otto and DolphLundgren. When not writing or working her much more boring job, she spends her time traveling, or wishing she were traveling.

A Chain of Pearls, Raemi’s debut mystery and the first in her Martha’s Vineyard Murders series, centers around the mysterious death of a famous journalist and the cover-up that implicates important Martha’s Vineyard residents. When London-based lawyer Kyra Gibson arrives on the idyllic island to settle her estranged father’s affairs, she ends up partnering with world-weary detective, Tarek Collins, as they uncover a web of intrigue and corruption involving a powerful senator, a dubious energy company, and a brutal murder.

Raemi stops into In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing the series:

 

Thank you for having me. This is such a cool question and I’m sure everyone approaches it a little differently. I can speak to my personal experience and process, which unsurprisingly starts with college.

I wasn’t particularly studious in college (or before, to be honest). I chose classes where participation and attendance were not a part of the grade. This worked great for about three years until I had to declare a major. I went with the subject I’d already accumulated the most credits in: Medieval European History. Seriously. It wasn’t ever a conscious decision. Most of those classes required some sort of research paper instead of a test. There weren’t any prerequisites or labs, and I liked the stories. The political intrigue, backstabbing, the royal escapades, wars, it was way better than the dry fiction they’d had us reading in British Literature (still cannot stomach Alexander Pope, but adult me does like Chaucer) and, most importantly, I didn’t have to attend lectures. I did have to spend a lot of time in dingy, dusty library basements, though.

This was before Google Books and other private research databases scanned in the collections of academic libraries. I didn’t have the ease of the internet at my fingertips and I had to do research in person. My university’s special collections were stored in these creepy humidity-controlled basements, always with spotty lighting, some with movable stacks on rails that I swear were bespelled to squash snoozing students. In the theology school’s collections (where most of my source material happened to be) I’d have to request what I needed from a bored-out-of-his-mind (read: stoned) freshman, put on these weird gloves, and read through original manuscripts. Fun fact, I had to leave my notebook and pencil in a separate room and walk back and forth. Note-taking became my cardio.

In retrospect, I realize that it’d have been easier just to go to class and take a multiple-choice exam, but I think that experience is where I got my taste for figuring things out on my own.

Nowadays, my research occurs about ninety percent from the comfort of my reading and writing chair, but the other ten percent is going to the places I’m writing about. The Martha’s Vineyard Murders series takes place on a fictional version of the real-life island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. I’ve been traveling there for years and truly love it. When I decided to write a mystery, I knew that the location was half the hurdle. All the greatest mysteries have such an immense yet specific sense of place: Rebecca and Manderley, The Dublin Murder Squad and Ireland, Chandler’s Los Angeles, Sherlock’s London. These books wouldn’t be the same without these settings.  

I conceptualized the Martha’s Vineyard Murders (then titled “My Mystery Book”) in the spring of 2021. The World was still under travel restrictions and I didn’t have the option of traveling to a remote place to study it for my story. (I’d originally wanted to put the book on the isle of Skye.) I knew that to keep it authentic, I had to go with what I knew. Lucky for me, there were a few places conducive to a mystery series that I knew like I knew my own name: Boston and Martha’s Vineyard. Of course having this basis of knowledge, didn’t mean I didn’t have to make frequent trips, draw dozens of maps, stalk Facebook groups, or consume local news articles like I was planning to run for a selectperson seat, but it gave me something to start with and I think that first step is the hardest one.

The first two books in the series, A Chain of Pearls and The Wraith’s Return include quite a bit about boats and sailing. Prior to the MVM series, my knowledge of watercraft was limited to Disney Land’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I had to teach myself the lingo, the parts, how it all works, and quite a bit about marinas and harbors generally. Luckily, I know a few boaters who were happy to chat with me, and of course the internet is a goldmine. Now, I’d probably be considered a sailing expert, which is ironic since I get seasick looking at boats, but I need to understand something thoroughly in order to determine what to include and what information is too niche and can be left off the page.

Another part of writing the MVM series is that there is just so much death. I’m happy to say I don’t have first-hand experience with being murdered, or finding any corpses, so I’ve had to learn quite a bit about human anatomy, and how people actually die from the injuries they sustain. I’m confident I’m on an FBI watch list with what I’ve been researching over the past few years. My search history is a terrifying place, and I tend to go down rabbit holes when I’m learning of unique ways of torturing and killing my characters. Much to my surprise, I find that I often lean on my background in Medieval history. Those guys were no joke when it came to creative (horrible) ways of killing people.

I think the biggest challenge for me with regards to research is learning those innate things people do that I don’t have experience with. These aren’t things that one can look up, but are common behaviors. For example, where do men keep their wallets? Their phones? How does it feel to lift a child? What does it take to host Thanksgiving dinner? Do doctors really carry doctor bags? What does an accountant really do? Thankfully, I have friends who have lived these experiences and they’re kind enough to share with me. Probably, the funniest thing I do, is I have a group text with my male friends, where I can ask “guy questions,” like the wallet thing, how they pack a suitcase (packing cubes and the ‘roll method’ seems to be a winner there), pretty much anything about professional sports. They’re very, very supportive.  

That all said, the result of my research, how I internalize and apply the information I’ve gathered is such a subjective process and I’m sure I’ve made errors. Writing in the mystery genre, I probably have more leeway with creative license and the plots can be a bit more fantastical. Making it just believable enough is what I think my readers will engage with. They can see themselves in the same position as my main characters.

 

You can learn more about Raemi Ray via her website and follow her on Instagram and Facebook. The books in the "Martha’s Vineyard Murders Series" are available now via Tule Publishing and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Lyn Squire

 

Lyn Squire was born in Cardiff, South Wales.  During a twenty-five-year career at the World Bank, he published over thirty articles and several books within his area of expertise, and was lead author for World Development Report, 1990, which introduced the metric – a dollar a day – that is still used to measure poverty worldwide. Lyn was also the founding president of the Global Development Network, an organization dedicated to supporting promising scholars from the developing world. He now devotes his time to writing. His debut novel, Immortalised to Death, published by Level Best Books in September 2023, introduced Dunston Burnett, a non-conventional amateur detective. It was a First Place Category Winner in the Mystery and Mayhem Division of the Chanticleer International Book Awards.  Dunston’s adventures continue in Fatally Inferior and The Séance of Murder, the second and third books in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy.  Lyn lives in Virginia with his wife and two dogs.

Dunston Burnett, a Victorian-era middle-aged, retired bookkeeper, is not cut out to be a detective, yet circumstances invariably conspire to place him at the center of singularly complex mysteries. In Fatally Inferior he must contend with the abduction of a member of Charles Darwin’s family, the missing person inexplicably spirited out of a locked-tight country house. A few days later, a ransom demand arrives at Down House, Darwin’s home in Kent, threatening that the hostage will be killed unless Darwin renounces his theory of evolution in The Times.  Meanwhile, a former maid at Down House dies, or so it seems, giving birth in London’s Shoreditch workhouse.  Believing her dead, her baby son is swiftly dispatched to a hell-hole orphanage in Hampshire. These apparently independent events converge in a vile act of vengeance: a hellish torture for the victim; the perfect revenge for the perpetrator. Will Dunston ever be able to expose the heart of this dark, confounding mystery?

Lyn Squire stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:

 

Researching the second book in a mystery series

Is researching the second book in a mystery series easier than researching the first?  To answer this question, I draw on my experience with Fatally Inferior, the second book in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy.  My answer is mixed.  In some areas, the second book requires less work; in others it can be more challenging and more demanding.

My first book, Immortalised to Death, is set in late nineteenth-century England.  For this book, I researched Victorian dress, furniture, architecture, vernacular, patterns of everyday behavior and so on, to provide period-authentic material for scene-setting and character portrayal.  This task is relatively straightforward, since information on most aspects of Victorian life is readily available on the internet.  Nonetheless, the effort takes time that would otherwise be available for writing.  My second book, Fatally Inferior, is also set in the Victorian era.  Much of the background research for book one was, therefore, of immediate use for book two, a huge labor-saving help. 

Another way in which a prior book can significantly reduce the research required for the current book is through characters that appear throughout the series.  For example, Dunston Burnett, my protagonist, is the glue that binds the three-book series together.  A diffident, middle-aged, retired bookkeeper (think of a latter-day Mr Pickwick), he is not cut out to be a detective yet circumstances invariably conspire to place him at the center of singularly complex mysteries.  He is fully described when he first enters the story in Immortalised to Death so his presence in book two did not entail the need for additional research.  While the character evolves throughout the series, the associated extra research was minimal.      

A second book, however, invariably introduces new locations and characters which naturally require fresh research.  For example, Down House, Charles Darwin’s home in Kent, is not mentioned in the first book, but it is the venue for several scenes in Fatally Inferior, and its layout is crucial to the execution of the crime at the center of the book’s plot.  Down House is open to visitors.  The ground floor is set out as in Darwin’s time with the great man’s study furnished exactly as it was when he was writing The Origin of Species.  Given the house’s key role in my story and the likelihood that many readers would be well acquainted with the house, I decided I had to visit it myself to make sure that my description stayed true to the original. 

This may sound like an unusually burdensome research demand.  But the house is only an hour and a half’s journey from Central London, and many authors visit more distant locations that figure prominently in their books.  Moreover, I had undertaken a similar research excursion for my first book.  Book two’s new location did entail extra research, but, I judged, no more than I had expended on book one for the same purpose.  The same point holds for new secondary characters like Charles Darwin himself.  Additional research is called for, but, again, no more than I devoted to the same task for book one.

Conjuring up a storyline for my second book, however, proved a much more challenging task than for the first.  The kernel of the idea for the storyline in Immortalised to Death, my first novel, was crystalized in my mind before I began researching the book in any detail.  This, I suspect, is the case for most authors embarking on their first book.  As a result, research for that book was focused and limited.  It is the exact opposite for the second book.

Immersed in drafting the first, I had not allocated time to conceptualizing what I would write about in the second, so that when I wrapped up book-one, there was nothing on hand for book-two.  Instead of having a sparkling gem ready to propel the new novel, my literary cupboard was bare, and I found myself casting about from scratch for a fresh idea that would prove a worthy follow-up.  This, I imagine, happens to many other authors writing a mystery series.

To find the right storyline for book-two, I expanded my research about events and people in the time and place where I set my stories (Victorian England), hoping that something would spark my imagination.  And eventually something did.  I was reading Janet Browne’s two-volume biography of Charles Darwin (Voyaging and The Power of Place, Princeton University Press, 1995 and 2002 respectively) when two aspects of his life jumped out at me.  I had found an intriguing pair of leads for a new story. 

One arose from the uproar that greeted the publication of The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859.  Darwin was immediately bombarded with scathing reviews in academic journals, blistering editorials in the leading newspapers and crude cartoons in the cheaper broadsheets.  This avalanche of disgust and hatred from believers in God’s creation of man, led me to imagine a more malicious assault on the scientist.  Was this an idea I could use in my new novel?  Indeed, it was.  I explored several possibilities, finally settling on the abduction of a Darwin family member and a threat that the kidnap-victim would die unless Darwin retracted his theory in a letter to The Times. 

The other had to do with the blood relationship between Darwin and his wife, Emma.  They were first cousins; they had a common grandfather in the person of Josiah Wedgewood.  In the nineteenth century, the offspring of marriages between such close relatives were thought to suffer loss of vigor and infertility.  This fear weighed heavily on both husband and wife, and brought to mind an image of a couple desperate for a grandchild only to be cruelly robbed of any hope of a happy old age spent in the blissful company of their children’s children by a vile act of revenge.  I was soon picturing a scene in which Emma Darwin is forced to witness the horrific death of the couple’s only grandchild. 

Charles Darwin makes only a few fleeting appearances in Fatally Inferior, but the furor created by his theory of evolution and the consequences of his marriage to his first cousin, motivate and structure my entire story.  After much effort, considerably more than I expended on the first book, I had the pegs on which to hang my story.

Looking back on my experience with the second book in The Dunston Burnett Trilogy and the amount of research that was required compared with the first book, the key take-away is this: The overall quantity of research and background reading may not change that much but its distribution across activities changes significantly.  In my, probably typical, case, the focus of research shifted dramatically from scene-setting and character portrayal, all adequately covered in writing the first book, to the new and challenging task of conceiving a fresh idea for the second book’s storyline and developing it into a full-blown successor novel. 

 

You can learn more about Lyn Squire and his writing by visiting his website and by following him on Facebook and Goodreads. Fatally Inferior is now available via Level Best Books and can be found in all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Marlene M. Bell

 Marlene M. Bell has never met a sheep she didn’t like. As a personal touch for her readers, they often find these wooly creatures visiting her international romantic mysteries and children’s books as characters or subject matter. Marlene is an accomplished artist and photographer who takes pride in entertaining fans on multiple levels of her creativity. Marlene’s award-winning Annalisse series boasts Best Mystery honors for all installments including these: IP Best Regional Australia/New Zealand, Global Award Best Mystery, and Chanticleer’s International Mystery and Mayhem shortlist for Copper Waters, the fourth mystery in the series.

In Bell's latest mystery, A Hush at Midnight, former celebrity chef Laura Harris, once celebrated for her show-stopping pastries and irresistible desserts, is now making headlines for a far darker reason:  Laura has been accused of murder. How could this petite chef have brutally smothered beloved small-town matriarch and World War II ferry pilot veteran, Hattie Stenburg? Hattie wasn't just a pillar of the community, she was Laura's confidant and mentor. The shocking twist? Hattie’s Will included recent changes, bypassing next-of kin and leaving her entire fortune and historic estate to Laura. As Laura scrambles to clear her name, she uncovers sinister secrets lurking beneath the town’s idyllic surface. The real murderer is always one step ahead, leaving taunting clues and threatening Laura to leave Texas—or face deadly consequences. With time not a luxury, Laura must untangle the web of deceit before the killer makes her the next victim.

Marlene Bell stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the book:

 

Research for novels has become more of a science for me. After four installments to my Annalisse series, a children’s book, and my new release cozy mystery A HUSH AT MIDNIGHT, I quickly found techniques that didn’t work and gravitated more to those that gave me the true results. Fear of a reader calling a foul on misinformation or bad information in my books has kept me awake many nights. Bottom line: Even though my stories are fiction, the sights, sounds, and actual scenery of the places I write about have to be accurate in order for the reader experience to feel real to that person.

My process begins with a complete outline of my manuscript, scene by scene. I envision each character; where they are, what they’re thinking, and how to leave a cliffhanger at the end of the chapter. Backfilling the sensory information once the outline basics are complete.

When I began to write the first Annalisse novel in 2010, I had no clue where the story was going, nor did I care. My objective was to write a romance. A standalone book. That’s it. It wasn’t until my third draft and wandering subplots I couldn’t keep straight, that a talented developmental editor came to the book’s rescue. She quickly saw the issues and mended my ways. Without an outline as a guide, I couldn’t contain the random elements that did nothing but confuse the reader.

I outline using lined 3 x 5 cards, one card per scene. In a separate diary, I list each character by name and add their characteristics to keep them real and unlike other characters in the book. Also listed are their motivations—what they want from the Main in the book. In my mysteries, I also like to drop a Cast of Characters page in front of the first chapter so that the reader can use it as reference in case they forget a player. A Hush at Midnight has fewer characters than in previous books. The more characters, the harder it is for the reader to recall each one should they show up in the beginning and not again until the mid-point. The Cast of Characters idea was taken from the old Pocket crime books from the 1950s. I hear from readers all the time about that page. It’s an overwhelming success!

How do I make my book locations come to life? Perhaps it’s the generation I grew up in, but I’ve found the old-fashioned methods work best for me. In the age of the internet, I see too many people relying on search results from the giant engines that power the information age. Unfortunately, many top result rankings are paid for by the corporations or individuals who are putting out a narrative. One of their choosing and not always the truth. Sites like Wikipedia and the like are places I tend to steer from because the information is a compilation of information and ideas from others.

Because my books are spiked with sensory details, the best place to obtain images for countries I’ve never traveled to are from the photographers and sightseers who have been there. My favorite place to retrieve the visuals and imagine the landscape are through coffee table books published by photographers who have been on the ground. They explain how it feels to be in the space. Most of the books in the Annalisse series travel to places like Greece, Italy, and New Zealand. Without the visuals and descriptions found in expert’s own published works, I can’t imagine my novels having the realistic feel to them. Readers love to be taken away to places they’ve never been. The more details an author can share, the more their readers will return for the next book.

Many of the stories I write about are based on my own personal experiences. I depend upon the experts to guide me through narratives out of my realm of expertise, such as the next project I’m currently outlining. My husband is an expert in the electric field, and I’ll be relying heavily on his experience—to get it right.

 

You can learn more about Marlene Bell via her website, and follow her on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. A Hush at Midnight is now available via all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Simon Marlowe

 Simon Marlowe is an up-and-coming British crime thriller author, and was a selected author at the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival 2024 (Harrogate International Festivals). A consummate wordsmith, he has excelled as a darkly comic crime author, with his fast paced and action-packed Mason Made trilogy. Like reading a Guy Ritchie movie with a Ken Loach conscience, Simon skillfully blends social and political issues to create a compellingly relevant narrative, on a par with the best in modern crime fiction today. Simon spent his formative years living in South London, indulging in political activism and music, graduating from a number of universities in politics, education and management. He eventually moved back to his home city in Essex, and after studying for a creative writing MA, settled down to developing as a writer. Since 2017, he has been successfully publishing, making people laugh, cry and scream!

In Marlowe's latest darkly-comic-crime-meets-spy-thriller, The Heart Is A Cruel Hunter, Steven Mason has an axe to grind and just needs to work out who deserves it. Falling fully into the darkness of Hell, Steven lives a crude, rude, cruel, and heartless life in the streets of Amsterdam, cutting himself off from his old life to indulge in drug-fuelled debauchery. In an attempt to reestablish his criminal career during the coronavirus pandemic, he immerses himself into the blood and guts of conspiracy and Far-Right politics, war crimes, and war criminals. But nothing is as it seems, as Steven is propelled by covert love into festering darkness. When faced with an ultimatum, in the form of becoming a member of the ruthless Bloodaxe gang—knee-deep in dealing and drug trafficking— will he pull himself out of the darkness he’s become so accustomed to? Or will he sink even further down?

Simon Marlowe stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing the book and series:

The Heart Is A Cruel Hunter, is the final installment in my darkly comic crime thriller trilogy Mason Made (so check out, The Dead Hand of Dominique – Book One, and Medusa And The Devil – Book Two). And for my protagonists next little adventure, I have Steven Mason, now a jaded drug-fueled criminal, indulging in extremes: personally, professionally (i.e. illegally) and politically.

It may be bold of me to claim the ‘Cruel Hunter’ has captured the zeitgeist of our time, but with Far Right riots, Far Right parties democratically elected in Europe, and Far Right ultra nationalist wars (I’ll leave you to speculate where you think that might be), I felt I would be failing in my thematic duty if I didn’t integrate the political contemporary issue into a bit of crime, murder and mayhem.

Hopefully, if you indulge in purchasing the ebook or paperback (available online from all major retailers!) and you take the obvious next step to read it, you may be surprised to learn that about 90% of the novel is based on fact. Not that I want to stray into Baby Reindeer territory here, because I will say explicitly that the ‘Cruel Hunter’  is a dramatization of Far Right politics, and the ‘facts’ have been integrated to fit into the narrative.

Unfortunately, we are living in a time where nationalism, power, and propaganda are dominant forces, perhaps pushing the world ever closer to some rather unpalatable governing systems. But you’ll be glad to know all is not lost, not if art and literature can be used to laugh at the thugs, tyrants and demagogues.

Mercifully, my anti-hero, Steven Mason, has sufficient moral ambiguity to indulge in criminality whilst retaining a sense of what is right and wrong. Murder, for Steven, is necessary to survive, crime is a way of life (and also happens to pay his bills), but that is nothing compared to the Far Right characters he encounters on a journey that has an underlying purpose which is gradually revealed. Steven may start off unhinged, but that is nothing compared to the bonkers antics of the Far Right criminals and politicians he needs to pander to, characters who are ideologically maladjusted with one thing in common: they think anything that is different should be systematically exterminated.

Perhaps, if we were not living in such strange times, and we considered the Far Right as a poorly psychiatric patient, we would be able to treat them successfully, integrate them back into the community, following a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and grandiose delusions. However, talking therapies in such cases would be ineffective, and any rational doctor would probably recommend large doses of anti-psychotics, a regime of electroconvulsive therapy followed by an irreversible lobotomy. Although I would still worry, that dulled and subdued, the radical conspiracy supremacist, would still be a danger to themselves and others.

But rest assured, Steven Mason has no liberal constraints holding him back. He knows that if he were to ever find himself reading a book called The Heart Is  A Cruel Hunter, and a rabid dog is running towards him, he will throw the book at it to stop it in its tracks.

 

You can learn more about Simon Marlowe and his books by visiting his website and can follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The Heart is a Cruel Hunter (Mason Made Trilogy Book 3) is now available from the publisher, Cranthorpe Millner, and all major bookstores.

Author R&R with Michael Wolk

 Michael Wolk has written screenplays (Innocent Blood, directed by John Landis), theatrical plays and music (Ghostlight 9), and is also a theatrical producer for Broadway (Pacific Overtures, Karate Kid), Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and more. He founded the nonprofit All For One Theater, which has staged over 50 solo shows off-Broadway since 2011, and he directed the award-winning documentary, You Think You Really Know Me: The Gary Wilson Story. He also found time to write the mystery novels, The Beast on Broadway, The Big Picture, and Signet.

His latest project is the cyber thriller, "DevilsGame," which launches today. He didn't want to just write a thriller, he wanted to immerse readers in a story the same way he captures audiences with the stage. So he created something unique: an interactive, multimedia "cyberthriller" that's meant to be read entirely online, blending action, satire, and clickable clues. The story opens with a virtual Blackberry text conversation: a cross-platform virus has swept the globe, turning smartphones into mobile IEDs and causing explosions worldwide. Claire Bodine, a fiery televangelist, and Nathan Rifkin, the cunning mastermind behind the world's most addictive video games, form an unlikely duo as the last line of defense against digital Armageddon. Claire sees the hand of Satan behind the chaos, while Nathan smells a geopolitical conspiracy. Either way, time is running out to get to the bottom of it.

Michael Wolk stops by In Reference to Murder to discuss his innovative creation:

 

It's going to sound strange, but the creation of DevilsGame all began with the realization that I was reading with my thumb. Instead of reading the books piled up by my bedside, I was gazing raptly into my smartphone, scrolling through the events of the day and clicking hyperlinks that added context to the stories I was reading.

I thought: why not write a novel that meets readers like me where they are: on their phones? And why not write a story that employs the “superpower” of hyperlinks to enhance and expand the story?

And it seemed to me the story had to be about an Internet Armageddon that readers would experience the same way we experience REAL crises these days: on our phones, scrolling for the latest developments, then surfing between news sites and social media to get more information—often weaving between fact and fiction without even noticing the boundaries between them!

So DevilsGame became a story about our smartphones going haywire, told on your phone, unfolding “in real-time” through your exploration of the contents of the hero’s smartphone.

I knew I wanted DevilsGame to be a cyber thriller, but it is based on facts that are beyond thrilling – they are terrifying!

In the 24-hour clock of DevilsGame, there is a cascade of hacks that rock the world. Each of the hacks in the book is modeled on an actual, documented attack that was carried out in the past. Each of these attacks were considered “zero day” exploits at the time – meaning hacks that had never occurred before and against which there was no ready defense.

The wrinkle that DevilsGame presents is that all these "greatest hits of hacking" are sequenced one right after the other, with cumulative and catastrophic consequences. My research quickly discovered an internet ecosystem that is astonishingly frail and in deathly peril from bad (state) actors who have already proven they can burrow deeply and often invisibly into its infrastructure.

As I result, I want to share this simple but harrowing maxim:

º Anything connected to the internet can be hacked

º Everything is becoming connected to the internet

º Everything – and everyone – on the Internet is potentially an open book

So please! Protect your data! And don’t entrust your digital life to the “cloud” – keep hard or hard drive copies of your vital information in multiple safe locations! Our entire lives our on the web. Remember the web can easily become a trap that ensnares.

 

You can learn more about Michael and his various projects through his website and also his personal website and follow him on Facebook and LinkedIn. The DevilsGame is live as of today, and you can check it out via this link.

Author R&R with David Finkle

 David Finkle has covered the arts and politics for The New York Times, The New York Post, The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The New Yorker, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and The Huffington Post, among others. He is author of the story collections, People Tell Me Things and Great Dates With Some Late Greats, as well as the mystery novel, The Man With the Overcoat, called one of the ten best novels of the year by Foreword magazine. His latest mystery, released today, is The Great Gatsby Murder Case.

On a beautiful spring day in New York City, writer Daniel Freund finds a long-sought-after 1953 edition of The Great Gatsby, free for the taking on the steps of a brownstone down the block. But when he brings home his treasure, the words on the page begin to glow, and a hand appears out of the pages sending Daniel secret messages. Prompted by The Great Gatsby itself, Daniel begins his own investigation. Accompanied by a hardheaded retired police detective and a nosy-body neighbor, he works to unfold the pieces of this supposedly solved case. He knows a murder took place, the book told him so, so why is everyone else convinced it was suicide?

David Finkle stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the book:

 

How did I come up with the idea for The Great Gatsby Murder Case and then follow-up with any research? Beats me. Well, almost beats me.

There I was walking down my street one day, thinking about I don’t know what. Maybe wondering whether I’d remembered to pick up everything I needed at Gristede’s or some household notion along those lines. And that’s when suddenly—just like that—a random idea popped full-blown into my head: Why not write a mystery set on this street?

It's not that I’d ever written a  mystery before. I’ve read them, of course. I love mysteries and respect the authors like crazy. From teenagery I’ve been obsessed with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and mystery writers right up to today. As a one-time regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, I’ve even interviewed Patricia Cornwell, a terrific interviewee.

But writing one? It’s crossed my mind but never more than fleetingly, usually because, as I analyze it, mysteries are the one genre where writing isn’t ready to begin until the complete plot has been worked out down to every last detail and clue. Am I wrong about that?

When, however, that write-a-mystery thunder bolt jolted me, it didn’t come outfitted with a plot. Just the cute go-ahead-and-write-one prompt. The subsequent mental monologue started, as I recall, with a celebratory, “Why not?” and was succeeded by, “I know I’ll need a tight plot, but so what?”

I’d just published my last novel—Keys to an Empty House (Plum Bay), having to do with family, father-son stuff—and wasn’t at work on the next one.  I say “at work,” whereas I often regard writing as “at play.” Why shouldn’t writing be play, depending on the content intent?

Authors are often described as at work, but often, when I’m writing, I’m having fun. What I’m doing seems more like play than work. Mightn’t writing a mystery feel like play? I was, right then, prepared to play.

That settled within those first fast-paced seconds on the street, I was percolating. (I grew up when coffee was still brewed in percolators.) And I was still ambling—but more slowly—towards my building and second-floor apartment when something else grabbed me.  If I set the mystery on my block, why not make the detective an amateur like myself? And had I ever learned there had been a mystery on my block, and had I ever furthermore learned there’d been a murder and/or murderer on the block, how would I go about solving it?

Then, the pressing query became, “How would I learn about  the murder or murderer?” Perhaps the obvious answer is that someone on the block mentioned it to me, but one of my quirks is: I’m not generally happy with the obvious. I try to avoid it. My mind goes farther afield. What occurred to me about the origins of my murder/murderer information that wouldn’t be obvious: A book.

A book!? Yes, again out of nowhere I thought a book was clearly the thing. But what book? Millions were available to me. But one pressed forward urgently: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. Why so suddenly, so completely right? Many of us know its history. Published in 1925, some years after Fitzgerald  left Princeton—where he surely knew Jay Gatsby-Nick Carraway-Tom Buchanan types—the novel was not an immediate success. His first, This Side of Paradise, was. Nonetheless, the initial movie adaptation was 1926. (Scott and Zelda walked out of a screening.) To date there have been three more. By the 1930s, book sales faded more precipitantly but were revived in the 1950s and remain staggering today.

But more than any of that, The Great Gatsby is, in my opinion, the best American novel of the twentieth century. It’s the word-perfect obvious choice. (Here, I broke my rule and did reach for the obvious.) I figured if I settle on this one for the book in my forthcoming mystery, I get to re-read it, a pastime I indulge every couple of years.

I now hurried home, immediately sat down with the 1953 paperback edition from my collection and started perusing. Don’t you know that on the very first page the words “victim” and “detect” leaped out? What more did I need to convince me I was on the right mystery track? All I had to do next was start writing. The plot would come to me.

As would any necessary research. And now a confession: I’m not an inveterate researcher. I kept it to a minimum, which isn’t easy where a mystery is concerned. One helpful aspect: Poison wouldn’t be involved, as it so often is with Christie. Guns were. I had to find out about, for instance, Glocks and Magnums. I did. I had to check out police procedure. Luckily, there’s a precinct half a block from me, where officers are often seen walking to or from or standing around the entrance. I quizzed one or two of them. More? Part of the New York City story branches out to Dayton, Ohio, about which I know some but not all. I pegged answers by calling the Dayton Daily News.  

But enough of that. It all paid off, and now as The Great Gatsby Murder Case—with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece accounting for some of its solution—is here.

 

You can learn more about David Finkle and his writing via his website, enjoy his podcasts on The Hour of Lateral Thinking, and follow him on Facebook and Goodreads. The Great Gatsby Murder Case is now available via all major booksellers.

Petrona Award Winner Announced

 

The Petrona Award was established to celebrate the work of Maxine Clarke, one of the first online crime fiction reviewers and bloggers, who died in December 2012. Maxine, whose online persona and blog was called Petrona, was passionate about translated crime fiction, but in particular that from the Scandinavian countries. This year's winner of best translated Scandinavian crime novel is Dead Men Dancing by Jógvan Isaksen translated from the Faroese by Marita Thomsen and published by Norvik Press. This is only Isaksen’s second novel to be translated into English following Walpurgis Tide. 

Other titles on the 2024 shortlist included:

• Anne Mette Hancock - The Collector tr. Tara F Chace (Denmark, Swift Press)
  
  
• Jørn Lier Horst - Snow Fall tr. Anne Bruce (Norway, Michael Joseph)
  
  
• Arnaldur Indriðason - The Girl by the Bridge tr. Philip Roughton (Iceland, Harvill Secker)
  
  
• Åsa Larsson - The Sins of our Fathers tr. Frank Perry (Sweden, MacLehose Press)
  
  
• Yrsa Sigurðardottir - The Prey tr. Victoria Cribb (Iceland, Hodder & Stoughton)

Author R&R with Alexa Donne

 Alexa Donne is the Edgar nominated author of Pretty Dead Queens, The Ivies, and The Bitter End, young adult thrillers featuring terrible teens and big twists. She loves exploring themes of class and wealth, toxic friendships (especially between young women), and the double-edged sword of trying to keep up with the Joneses in the era of social media and toxic capitalism. By day, she lives in Los Angeles and works in television marketing. The rest of the time, she contemplates creative motives for murder and takes too many pictures of her cats.

Alexa’s latest young adult thriller, The Bitter End, follows eight students of LA’s elite Warner Prep, who can’t wait for their Senior Excursion—five days of Instagrammable adventure in one of the world’s most exclusive locations. But they can’t believe their bad luck when they end up on a digital detox in an isolated Colorado ski chalet. Their epic trip is panning out to be an epic bore . . . until their classmates start dropping in a series of disturbing deaths. The message is clear: this trip is no accident. And when a blizzard strikes, secrets are revealed, betrayals are exposed, and survival is at stake in a race to the bitter end.

Alexa stops by In Reference to Murder to talk some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:

I LOVE isolation trope mysteries. LOVE. In movies, on TV, but especially in books. A ticking clock, no escape, and a limited pool of suspects—the tension in these stories is so high, and the dynamics at play so fun. 

Writing The Bitter End, I challenged myself to set a cast of teens loose on this beloved genre trope. I wanted to see how I could fit the constraints of YA world (there has to be some kind of adult supervision… at least to start) into an adult genre, while also bringing something fresh and exciting to the conceit so that it might surprise and delight seasoned adult readers.

The closed circle mystery is essentially a balancing act: a large cast size, a number of inevitable deaths, and of course the big reveal. It’s a game of teetering precariously to build and sustain suspense as I work to hide the true killer’s identity while not giving short shrift to characters who are not part of the narrative for long. Ultimately, I landed on eight teens rather than the Christie classic ten, and a minimum body count (though I won’t spoil the exact number!). It felt important to have enough personalities to stir up trouble while also not leaving the suspect pool too large at the end.

I chose multi-POV and multi-timeline, in part to stretch myself with a different thriller format, as well as to play with themes of friendship, appearances, and perspective, all of which change over time. I work backwards to construct my thrillers, so I started with a motive. Then built out a cast of spoiled Los Angeles prep school teens to kick the plot mechanics into motion.

But for an isolation trope to work, I needed to figure out how to get my new cast away from their parents and in a remote location. I knew the group should be somewhat disparate to create a lot of conflict and intrigue. They are not all friends, which ruled out a besties Spring Break trip or a post-Prom retreat. Authenticity is important to me in any thriller, but especially YA—it should feel feasible at its heart.

The solution to my problem came at a lunch with some fellow writer friends, including one who’d attended a Los Angeles prep school. She blew my mind when she talked about a program for seniors where for one week they’d get to go on a grand excursion—and real examples from her school included Alaskan dog-sledding and a Hollywood directing workshop! It was so fantastic and sparked my imagination—which is why those real examples are in the book!—and provided the perfect jumping off point for my isolation mystery.

And since I’m an East Coaster who sincerely misses weather (after fifteen years in Southern California), I knew I wanted a mountainous/forest setting with heavy rain or snow. I settled on Colorado for two reasons: first, the state and its glorious 14,000 feet peaks came up in several of the 20+ high-altitude mountaineering tomes I’d read, and second, I had several friends who were either native Coloradans or who had moved there.

And with my setting locked in, I now got to contend with several high-altitude, mountain, and snow-related elements that required some honestly pretty fun, if morbid and mildly terrifying, research. Some highlights:

High altitude sickness

The prep school teens in the book end up stranded in a ski chalet on top of a Colorado mountain of significantly high elevation. The copious amounts of non-fiction and memoir written by and about mountaineers who climb 8,000 meter peaks inevitably all touch upon high altitude sickness and its varying complications, including high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), and high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), hypoxia, and their symptoms. My made-up mountain isn’t quite that high, but altitude sickness is likely to strike an Angelino at high elevation for the first time.

Dark Summit by Nick Heil, in particular, went into great detail about a man who survived a near-death experience on Everest. Being able to get inside the mind, with vivid description, of someone experiencing hypoxia and nearly dying from it was invaluable. (Did you know it’s a common phenomenon to hallucinate a person following you/being with you, up high on the mountain? This is stuff made for the thriller genre!)

Cell phone emergency access 

It’s the lynchpin of the modern-day thriller, isn’t it: How to deal with technology? Especially in a closed circle mystery with an isolation trope, the key is to get characters AWAY from technology and any hope of help from the outside world. I’m fascinated by wild, out of the way places and all the terrible things that can happen to you there. The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman reinforced that there are many places in the United States where it’s easy to fall to the elements with ZERO recourse. Often, those searching for you may simply never know what happened.

My editor wanted to be double triple sure these students couldn’t seek help. “Surely they’d just call 9-1-1?” she said. Cellphones have an emergency call function. This led both me and her down a rabbit hole of cell phones and emergency communications in 2024, as technology is constantly evolving and mystery authors must tear their hair out to make their plots work.

Multiple Colorado friends confirmed that there are many spots in the mountains where cell coverage is so spotty to the point that it is nonexistent. I did a deep dive to double confirm: emergency calls require a cell tower within a certain distance to work. But then a wrench in the works, at pass pages, no less: newer models of iPhones and now Androids have emergency satellite texting systems.

Here’s where all those books on mountaineering came in handy—they all have passages on satellite phones. How they work, when they work, and, helpful for me, when they don’t. Satellite phone may not work under heavy cloud cover or during storms. Luckily, I already had a blizzard at play, and used my creative license as the author to make things that much trickier for my poor cast of characters trying to survive a killer.

Sadly, I can’t share some of the juicier bits of research without spoilers! But I can relay one anecdote whose lesson is: sometimes you’ll blank on the silliest thing despite meticulous planning, and it’s important to be scrappy with your edits! With all my planning and research into cell signals and plot mechanics to deprive my cast of their phones, Internet access, and eventually power… I still managed to write an entire plot thread in the first draft that hinged on the characters looking through people’s Instagram DMs.

Then, my editor pointed out to me “but they have no Internet, so how could they check Instagram?” Reader, I died. You have to laugh about it though! I had to get creative in terms of keeping the information gleaned while tossing out most of what I’d written for that subplot. On the plus side—it made the back half of act 2 much tighter! Do the best you can, but you can’t do it alone—and some of your best work will happen in editing (and with your editor!).

 

You can learn more about Alexa Donne via her website and also follow her on Instagram, Goodreads, and YouTube. The Bitter End is now available via Random House Books and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Mel Harrison

 After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in Economics, Mel Harrison joined the US Department of State, spending the majority of his career in the Diplomatic Security Service, winning the State Department Award for Valor and its worldwide Regional Security Officer of the Year Award. Following government retirement, Mel spent ten years in corporate security and consulting work with assignments often taking him throughout Latin America and the Middle East, before turning his hand to writing. He’s penned six books in the series featuring Alex Boyd, a State Department special agent and regional security officer with the Diplomatic Security Service, including the latest installment in that series, Crescent City Carnage.

In Crescent City Carnage, Alex Boyd and Rachel Smith are only a day into their long-awaited vacation in New Orleans to join their good friend and colleague, Simone Ardoin, when she is brutally murdered. Simone’s well-connected parents, long-time residents of New Orleans, are devastated by the tragedy and implore both Alex and Rachel to work with the New Orleans Police Department to find her killer. The city is infamous for its laissez-faire attitude, as well as its corruption. Nevertheless, Alex must work with the city's cops to break the case, also drawing support from State Department special agents. Identifying the killer is one thing but locating him proves more complicated than anticipated—Is the killer just lucky or does he have an inside source who is helping him stay one step ahead of the cops? The more Alex and Rachel delve into the case, the more they discover that New Orleans is a unique city full of its own traditions, family ties, and way of life. But the clock is ticking, and they need to capture the killer before he disappears forever.

Mel Harrison stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R today about writing the book:

Toward the end of my twenty-eight year career in the Foreign Service, serving as either a special agent with Diplomatic Security or as an economic officer, I realized that I had experienced a number of adventures in my lifetime that could be turned into intriguing action thrillers. After State Department retirement, I worked another ten years for corporate security, accumulating even more experiences. Finally, in complete retirement, it was time to challenge myself and start the writing process.

I have always enjoyed the action-adventure/thriller genre for my own reading, and so began my writing journey. I decided to write about what I knew and where I had served or visited, rather than struggling with unfamiliar territory. My six novels are based upon my personal experiences, albeit, with embellished characters and scenes to excite the audience. While the books and characters are fiction, they are often composites from real life, either experienced by me, or drawn from situations of which I am aware.

Many of the location settings, such as Rome, London, or Paris, I have visited again and again. Additional places, like Cairo or Islamabad, I also worked there and visited in retirement, even if less frequently than the former set of locations. As an avid photographer, I can research details of sites that my memory is vague on. Also, I use the internet to research technical details on everything from weapons to foreign police structures to plants and vegetation. Finally, nothing beats firsthand knowledge, so I have sought out subject matter experts, as needed.

While most people will say that thrillers are plot-driven, I love to create memorable characters as well. Just as the stories are fictional, so are my characters. Yet, I have drawn on people I have known, put them in different settings than where we met, and added features to their personality or appearance to make the reader feel that they can visualize the character or understand his or her motivation.

Equally important, I always think a long time about how to create villains. Reading how other authors handle this issue can be instructive. No one who buys a book wants to read about cardboard characters, and this includes the bad guys. The villains may be evil or demented, but they also have families and friends. Therefore, they need to be three dimensional and realistic. The reader needs to understand the villain’s motivation. Without excellent villains, the author doesn’t have an interesting story to tell.

I must note that I have a lot of restaurant scenes in my six books. Okay, I admit it, my wife and I are foodies. Here is a tidbit readers should know. Every restaurant in every book is real, and what my protagonist, Alex Boyd, and his wife, Rachel, are eating, my own wife and I have eaten at that very restaurant.

When I began creating my stories, I knew I wanted to put my protagonist, Alex Boyd, in harm’s way. Since he is a trained special agent, I needed to have him carry a firearm. For me, the best solution was the simplest. He either uses the real weapons issued by the Diplomatic Security Service, or in the one book, Moving Target, where is working in the private sector, I gave him a weapon that I personally owned and fired many times. Sometimes authors who are not familiar with guns get tripped up trying to write firearms scenes that just would not work in the real world.

An area that can be difficult to write about involves the sexual relationship of my two main characters, Alex Boyd and Rachel Smith. When they first meet in Death in Pakistan, there is an immediate attraction, both physically and intellectually. The question is how far an author should describe this relationship. I took the view that the reader must believe their love for each other is deep and real. It must be based on something more than a casual handshake. Therefore, sex is part of that relationship and needs to be presented to the reader without going over-the-top into pornographic description. Since Rachel is put in harm’s way several times in my novels, the feelings Alex and Rachel have for each other must be based upon the full spectrum of emotions.

I will close with a final point about politics. I try to leave politics out of my books as much as possible. Readers buy novels to escape everyday life. They want to be entertained, not lectured too. Of course, Alex and his colleagues occasionally mock a specific Washington policy as wrong-headed, but that is different than the author taking gratuitous shots at either political party. When I worked in the Foreign Service, the internet had not yet been created. Therefore, there was no social media or even cable TV channels. I honestly did not know the politics of my fellow Foreign Service officer. It wasn’t important to getting the job done or to protecting employees from terrorists, kidnappers, spies, or criminals.

 

You can follow Mel Harrison on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. Crescent City Carnage is now available via all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Michael Cohen

 

Since his retirement from University teaching, Michael Cohen has been writing personal essays about his family, about lifelong pursuits such as golf and birding, about newer interests in flying and amateur astronomy, and above all about six decades of reading. His essays—collected in A Place to Read (2014, IP Press, Brisbane) and And Other Essays (2020, IP Press)—have appeared in Harvard Review, Birding, The Humanist, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, and dozens of other venues. He is the author of six other books, including an introductory poetry text, The Poem in Question (Harcourt Brace, 1983) and an award-winning book on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Georgia, 1989). Michael Cohen lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Tucson, Arizona. His most recent book is The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries: A Mystery Guide and Finding List (Genius Books, 2024)

In 1891, a new London magazine, The Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation, and Doyle became rich. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal, and dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures. Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s "Seer of Secrets," Astro.

Michael Cohen stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about the book:    

The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries was my Covid book. During the year between the first lockdowns until I was fully vaccinated the following spring, I did a lot of reading, and most of it was detective short stories published from the 1890s to the first decade of the twentieth century in England, the United States, and Europe. These stories were not easily available twenty years earlier, when I wrote my first book on mysteries, Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction (Associated University Presses, 2000). The stories first appeared in newspapers and magazines, and most had not been reprinted; a good big library might have a few of the periodicals, but if the stories appeared in New Zealand’s North Otago Times or the English Newcastle Weekly Courant, for example, I wasn’t going to find them.

But in the ensuing twenty years, these periodicals had all been digitized and made available through Gutenberg, Google Books, Hathi Trust, and a score of other internet archives. The stories that entertained our great-grandparents and their parents could now be read by anyone for free, in their original context between news of the day and quaint advertisements; best of all, they could be read with the engravings and lithographs that illustrated them. Moreover, there were new reprints of the stories in book form published by Coachwhip Press, the Library of Congress Crime Classics, the Mysterious Press Crime Classics Series, and others.

I read through hundreds of detective short stories, and though I started without any clear writing plan, a book idea began to emerge as I took notes on my reading. I really needed to tell two stories about this treasure trove of entertainment from a century and a quarter earlier.

One story was about Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. In 1891, a new London magazine, The Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation, and Doyle became rich. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures.

The second story was about those other writers who followed Doyle. They created an enormous flowering of this kind of tale, with stories that featured female and male detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and conmen. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before.

So, The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries: A Mystery Guide and Finding List starts with the story of Doyle’s phenomenal success with the Holmes stories. I look at Doyle’s storytelling in the first ones published, with an eye to his plot construction and the original turns that he gave to situations that had been in the sensational literature repertoire for decades, as well as those that were brand new with him.

Most of the book is taken up with a closer look at the variety of stories written by those who followed Doyle. I give brief descriptions of the mysteries and how they struck out in new directions and created a range of mystery literature of astounding diversity. Finally, I provide a guide for finding the stories in their original, illustrated magazines. Here you’ll find names you knew such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.

Once I sat down with the story lines in mind and my notes at hand, the book took only a few months to write, and it was a pleasure to revisit all those tales of detectives at work.

Michael Cohen's book, The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries (Genius Book Publishing, 2024), is available from Amazon and from the publisher. His earlier collections of essays, A Place to Read (Interactive Press, 2014) and And Other Essays (Glass House Books, 2020), are available in print or audiobook form.

 

Author R&R with Hannah D Sharpe

 Hannah D Sharpe is an American domestic suspense author. She enjoys creating morally ambiguous female characters with stories that incorporate mental health awareness and struggles that women face today. Hannah also has an MSN Ed, with a background in emergency medicine, nursing education, and health insurance and a focus on underserved communities. Hannah lives in Northwest Washington State with her husband, three children (ages 10, 7, and 5), and a moody orange tabby cat. When not working, writing, and juggling the family’s extracurricular activities, you can find Hannah delving into the next home project while getting lost in an audiobook.

Between Lies and Revenge, Hannah's debut domestic suspense novel, centers on a daring jewel heist that becomes a lifeline for two women entangled in a web of deceit, pushing them to the brink of trust and betrayal in their quest for redemption and survival.

Hannah stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:

 

It may or may not come as a surprise that my debut novel Between Lies and Revenge is not the first novel I’ve written. The unpublished manuscripts gathering proverbial dust in a folder on my desktop were the most valuable research I’ve done to date.

To write a compelling story requires research long before research for the novel is addressed. This begins with reading avidly in the genres of interest. Reading as a writer goes beyond pleasure by adding research in structure, pacing, character development, and layering of story. In addition to reading published books, it is important for a writer to connect with other writers and find critique partners, beta readers, and writing groups, where the writer not only receives feedback, but gives it to others. By reading other writers works and offering valuable feedback the writer becomes knowledgeable in recognizing mishaps, developmental opportunities, and the steps in which a writer can take to get their work from an initial draft to published.

I have traditionally been a pantser—learning my story as I draft—which meant researching a lot while I was drafting Between Lies and Revenge. There was rarely a writing session in which I didn’t need to pull up Google. Google and the internet have always been my primary go to for research, with anxiety and three children who are now ages 5, 7, and 10 (younger when writing this novel). Additionally, I’m fortunate to have obtained a master’s degree in nursing, which was, in itself, an education about research collection and validation, and came in handy when researching the following for Between Lies and Revenge:

Gemology / Lapidary – I know nothing about the craft of jewelry making, repair, and evaluation and appraisal. However, my character, Elle, made it clear early on that she does. This meant many, many, Google rabbit holes. I spent a long time learning about equipment, processes, education and training, and industry specific terms. I then crosschecked information between sources to determine whether the information found was the most reliable and widely known. This research didn’t end with my first draft, but continued through every edit up until the end, verifying the information I had on the page and strengthening it with new details.

Infertility – Despite having my own experience with infertility, and being a nurse, I needed to delve deep into research for this topic, as I wanted to make sure my novel portrayed the most up-to-date and accurate information. For those who experience infertility and seek fertility assistance, the journey is very personal and becomes deeply engrained. Getting the details right were imperative, especially knowing my character, Olivia, would have a journey that was unique to her, as fertility treatments are personalized and specific as decided by the individual and their provider. This meant going above and beyond the Google search and into professionally published research, as well as speaking to individuals who went through fertility treatments different than mine and reaching out to nurses and physicians who specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. I was also open to feedback and did not become defensive when the information I had on the page was interpreted as inaccurate. Instead, I went back through the research process to verify details, correct inaccuracies, and make sure it all aligned throughout the different stages of editing.

Multi-Level Marketing (and its dark side) – I did a deep dive into research on this component of my story long before I knew I would write this novel. I spent the early years after my children were born longing for a community of moms and having a desire to fit in somewhere. I hadn’t yet found the writing community, but on my phone, right in front of my face, there was a world that said it offered what I was looking for and was wrought with positivity. Desperate to be within these inner circles and to create true connections, I joined various MLMs, and supported many more, slipping into debt and hiding spending from my husband. It wasn’t until I was trying to step away and recover from the impact it all had on my mental health that I decided to incorporate this thread into my writing as a type of therapy. Once I’d committed, I spoke to others who had similar experiences as me, and even read a fantastic non-fiction on the topic of the dark side of MLMs, the hold they have on women, and the use of toxic positivity to mask the wrongs they make (Hey, Hun by Emily Lynn Paulson).

There were many other, smaller components, that required online research as well, such as how long a person can be missing before being reported deceased, and by whom. I also needed to become familiar with Leesburg, VA, and NYC, as I’ve never been to either place. However, in my research I felt like I’d come to know Leesburg well. I also had a writing friend who lives in Virginia verify details, such as the weather and how the grass looks at the end of August, because the east coast is drastically different than the west coast (where I live).

My research on how to structure and pace a novel came full circle when I had an unscheduled edit that I refer to as my “surprise edit” eight months before my novel was scheduled to be released. I’d been given examples of novels that had done what I was trying to do throughout the edit process, and it wasn’t until I’d fully learned what it was like to edit with a publishing house and an editorial team, that I could truly embrace what needed to be done. I knew that my knowledge and the research I’d done wasn’t enough, so I reached out to a critique partner who had been studying the structure and pacing of novel writing for many years, and with her help we rearranged the entire first half of the novel, strengthening the pacing exponentially.

The biggest advice I can give to writers is to be open and receptive to feedback, because you don’t know what you don’t know until you learn otherwise. And when you know that you don’t know, you can begin to learn and research, then do it again, and again, and again, until you have a finished product you can be proud of.

 

You can learn more about Hannah Sharpe via her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads. Between Lies and Revenge is available from Simon & Schuster and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with donalee Moulton

 donalee Moulton is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written for print and online publications across North America, including The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Lawyer’s Daily, National Post, and Canadian Business. Her short stories have been shortlisted for a Derringer Award and an Award of Excellence from the Crime Writers of Canada. Other short stories have been published recently in After Dinner Conversation, The Antigonish Review, and Queen’s Quarterly. Her first mystery novel, Hung out to Die, was published in 2023, and the latest, Conflagration!, won the 2024 Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense (Historical Fiction).

Conflagration! is set on a warm spring day in April 1734, as a fire rages through the merchants’ quarter in Montréal. Within hours, rumors run rampant that Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved Black woman fighting for her freedom, had started the fire with her white lover. Less than a day later, Angélique is in prison, her lover nowhere to be found. Though she denies the charges, witnesses claimed Angélique was the arsonist even though no one saw her set the fire. In an era when lawyers are banned from practicing in New France, Angélique is on her own. Philippe Archambeau, a court clerk assigned specifically to document her case, believes Angelique might just be telling the truth, but time is running out as Archambeau searches for answers. Will the determined court clerk discover what really happened the night Montreal burned to the ground before it’s too late?

donalee stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:

The trial and tribulations of researching life – and death – in 1734

My second mystery novel, Conflagration!, is my first historical mystery. My publisher has a series of historical mysteries than span Canada from coast to coast. When she unexpectedly lost her Quebec writer, she offered me the opportunity to write the book and step back to 1734 when the colony of New France was ruled by King Louis XV. It was an opportunity I embraced. With trepidation.

At readings and book clubs, I joke that I am not from Quebec, I do not speak French as more than 80% of Quebecers do, and I do not write historical mysteries. So, of course, I said “yes” when my publisher offered me the opportunity to write Conflagration!. I am grateful I did.

What scared me most about writing the book was getting something wrong. Misspeaking. Misunderstanding. Misconstruing. The foundation for Conflagration! (and for all historical mysteries) is accuracy.  As a freelance journalist, I am used to writing on topics that I know little (and sometimes, nothing) about. I have written articles on everything from buying cyber insurance to surviving a helicopter crash to paying the tooth fairy. I know how to research, how to interview people, how to find people to interview, and how to find accurate sources of information. For the most part though, the research I’ve done was contemporary or contemporary adjacent. It wasn’t from 300 years ago.

Conflagration! chronicles the arrest, trial, and subsequent execution of Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved Black woman accused of setting the lower town of Montreal on fire. When the flames were finally squelched, forty-six homes and buildings were gone. The quarter, where the merchants lived and ran their businesses, was destroyed. Fortunately, no one died.

I had never heard of Angélique, had never read her story in the many history classes I took throughout school and university. I was not alone in this lack of knowledge. That is because Angélique’s story is also the story of slavery in Canada, and for centuries we have avoided the topic or rewritten the facts to shape the narrative. Fortunately, Angélique’s story is more well known in Quebec, where a plaque has been erected in her memory in Old Montreal.

As I delved into the events of April 10, 1734, I discovered others had gone before me. There were books, websites, articles, documentaries, and shorts. I embraced them all. Some of these sources also referenced court documents, meticulously recorded, albeit in French. One site translated those documents although translations from old French to modern English are not always clear and understandable. The golden rule in journalism is you must have at least two sources before you use any information. I also embraced this rule.   

As nerve-wracking as ensuring my story accurately referenced the trial transcripts and sequence of events from the first flames to Angélique’s final breath, I discovered that the justice system was only one element of research required. At one point, I had my main character, Philippe Archambeau, a court clerk assigned specifically to document Angélique’s case, get up early and make himself a cup of coffee. Then I asked myself, “Did they drink coffee in New France in 1734?” (They did, but tea was more common.)

This issue of everyday life came up in a myriad of ways. Philippe goes to put on boots. (Did they wear boots three hundred years ago? What kind?) His wife, Madeleine, is making supper. (How do you make supper when there are no stoves, no ovens, no electricity? What do you eat?)

The answers to these and a multitude of other questions were answered thanks to reliable sources on the internet, books written by authoritative sources, individuals knowledgeable about aspects of the story, the time, the history – and more.

I owe them all a debt of gratitude.

 

You can learn more about donalee and her books via her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. Conflagration! is now available via all major booksellers in ebook and print.

Author R&R with Richard Snyder

 Richard Snyder is a new author and a writer of spy fiction. It’s a good fit for him since he is a former intelligence officer who uses his background and experience to feature the unpredictability and moral chaos of intelligence operations. He is currently working on a trilogy that follows the professional life of a young spy—Owen Roberts—from the beginning of his career to its end. Two of his three novels have been published and the third is being written as we speak.

In his debut novel, The Clandestine Education of Owen Roberts, the Iraq War is a raging storm of blood and violence, the Service is fighting for its survival on and off the battlefield, and an Iranian diplomat in Paris reaches out to a retired spy. What follows is a tale of self-discovery in the ruthless world of espionage as Owen operates in a sphere of deceit and self-delusion, all while trying to come up with a moral code that he can live by.

The second novel in the Owen Roberts’ trilogy, Defector in Paradise, is a political/spy thriller that takes place during an election year. Tragic circumstances force Owen to team up with a cagey Soviet defector to expose one of the Cold War’s last and biggest secrets: the identity of a high-level mole operating within the US government who has his sights set on the White House.

At its heart, Defector in Paradise is a novel about the unimaginable manipulation of American politics and the actions of those who refuse to believe truths they cannot accept.

Richard Snyder stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching his novels:

Being a new author, one of the first things I had to figure out was the right balance between the use of factual or historical research and just plain old storytelling. Which was more important to me in telling spy stories that merge the past with the present in a believable and dramatic manner? And, believe it or not, two quotes from vastly different personalities helped guide me along the way. One was from Albert Einstein, who once said “that imagination was more important than knowledge.” And the other was from Elmore Leonard, one of America’s best crime fiction writers, who said when asked about the reason for his success: “I just leave out the parts that no one reads.”

In my first novel, The Clandestine Education of Owen Roberts, I needed to understand the complexity of life in Baghdad during the war, and I mean every aspect of life in that war-torn city. It was part of the backdrop and the narrative of one of the key characters. I needed an insider’s perspective so I read multiple books written by those with boots on the ground that gave me the authenticity I needed, the kind of stuff where truth is stranger than fiction, where people saw things with their own eyeballs. I didn’t use online resources very much, but I did use online mapping tools to validate physical locations as well as the time and distance traveled by characters in the book. What I learned most about the value of research in writing my first novel was that it helped me connect the dots of my storyline between the past and the present, and that I wanted to use my research in a way where I didn’t lose my reader’s attention. I didn’t want my research to become ‘one of the parts’ that no one reads. 

 In my sequel, Defector in Paradise, I used mostly online resources and my own personal knowledge and experience because of the esoteric origins of some of the key plot lines. I wasn’t going to find the kind of information I needed in libraries or elsewhere for this novel. I came to appreciate how research can be a two-edged sword: too much reliance on research can constrain how your story evolves, but research can also open doors to new storytelling possibilities that you were not aware of previously. I came away with the understanding that your ‘research’ should fit the story and not the other way around. I don’t know if it is that way with everyone, but that is what works for me.

In bringing my comments to a close, I would say that how you use your research is more important than where you get it from as long as you are dealing with trusted sources of information. For the most part, I like folding my historical research into a character’s dialogue when possible because it seems more natural that way and reads less like a history lesson. There are parts of my novels, however, where I strayed from this preference, but only because I thought the reader would find the historical detail of interest.

I know there are many more research sources available to writers that I have not discussed in my post, but I know other writers posting In Reference to Murder have done a good job of doing that. As I said at the beginning, I am a new author, so every time I pick up the pen or type on the computer I am learning something new about myself, my craft, the research that goes into writing a novel, and the difficult but rewarding art of writing fiction.

 

You can learn more about Richard Snyder and his writing via his website. The Clandestine Education of Owen Roberts and Defector in Paradise are available via all major booksellers.