Why it took my series protagonist three books to get a girlfriend

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’m a sucker for romance. While I don’t read straight romances, my favorite reads tend to include a satisfying love story along with great writing, smooth storytelling, and—a crucial element for me—endearing characters of depth and complexity. At the top of my list is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, started with a great love story (Cordelia and Aral Vorkosigan) and then took a leisurely arc of seven or eight books and more than a decade in fictional time to find Miles the perfect mate. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series and Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series are on the list: complex historicals brimming with excitement and a touch of magic, both with extraordinarily charismatic heroes who find (immediately or eventually) a larger-than-life Big Love. In the Dunnett books, the ultimate heroine is only ten years old when she and the hero first meet. In mysteries, I’m particularly fond of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne and Margaret Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott and Dwight Bryant (both brilliant examples of the traditional amateur sleuth with a law enforcement partner). In the first case, it’s love at first sight and obstacles to overcome in book after book. In the other, Maron herself has said when she started the series, she had no idea that Deborah and Dwight would fall in love.

In the past, I’ve said that it’s ironic that though I love romantic stories, I didn’t write one. Now, reviewing my literary role models, I can see that I was instinctively falling into the pattern of allowing the protagonist’s love story to unfold slowly over the course of a series arc. In the case of my protagonist, recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, it was not a matter of building the tension, peak after peak, in one evolving relationship, as Julia Spencer-Fleming does so brilliantly. Rather, like Miles Vorkosigan (if I dare to mention my own work and the dazzling Bujold’s in the same breath), Bruce has a lot of growing up to do before he can choose the right mate.

The theme of my mystery series, recovery from alcoholism, codependency, and other addictions and compulsions, gave Bruce some very good reasons not to have a girlfriend. The first book, Death Will Get You Sober, started with Bruce hitting bottom in a detox on the Bowery.

I’ve worked with a lot of homeless alcoholics, and believe me, most of them are not thinking about romance. Survival and getting the next drink takes all their attention. When Bruce gets to AA, he hears, along with “Don’t drink and go to meetings,” that he’s supposed to have “No relationships for the first year.” (I have had clients who had the illusion that meant that one-night stands were okay, as long as they didn’t get emotionally involved. But that’s another story.)

The secondary theme and subplot of the series, Bruce’s friendship with his two sleuthing sidekicks, his best friend Jimmy and Jimmy’s girlfriend Barbara, also supported Bruce’s lack of a love interest in the first book. Bruce has deeply disappointed Jimmy and Barbara, and a big part of his motivation for staying sober and solving the murders is to give the friendship a second chance. There’s a lot of love in this triumvirate, and some readers noticed a teeny bit of sexual tension between Bruce and Barbara, though it was essential to the story I wanted to tell that this would be resolved harmlessly at the end of the first book.

Bruce actually had a girlfriend in the manuscript I intended to be the second book of the series, which was rejected by my publisher at the time. Bruce is still fairly new in sobriety. Jimmy and Barbara are taking a weekend couples workshop, and Bruce tags along. The obnoxious relationship guru is murdered, and Bruce promptly falls for his widow. But this relationship has nowhere to go, and it’s apparent throughout the story.

This left Bruce free to get a crush on another murder suspect, the girlfriend of the drug dealer victim, in Death Will Help You Leave Him. He also had to break free from his crazy ex-wife, which meant dealing with the destructiveness of their relationship and his own codependency issues, love issues, rescue fantasies, or whatever you’d like to call them.

In the new book, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, Bruce and his friends take shares in a clean and sober group house in the Hamptons.

They’ve just arrived when they find the body of one of their housemates on the beach. It takes two more murders and the whole summer for them to figure out whodunit. In the meantime, Bruce is very much attracted to one of his housemates, the self-reliant and enigmatic Cindy. He’s ready now, but things keep getting in the way. It’s also a new experience to negotiate the landmines of an attraction in sobriety. In recovery, not drinking is just the beginning. After that, you have to change your whole life, and that includes refraining from doing anything you’ll be ashamed of in the morning. Do he and Cindy get to first base by Labor Day? Or home? I’m not telling—and don’t you dare read the last page first!

PLA: A Feast of Librarians

Elizabeth Zelvin


A couple of Thursdays ago, I drove from New York City to Philadelphia and back to schmooze with librarians, promote my work, and do a good deed by helping staff the Sisters in Crime booth at the Public Library Association’s biennial convention. Parent organization ALA, the American Library Association, stated in a March 6 press release:


“During this dynamic time of change, thousands of public librarians, library professionals, authors, publishers and vendors from across the country and around the world will meet in Philadelphia, March 13 – 17, for the Public Library Association (PLA) 2012 Conference to discuss a host of pressing issues affecting the future of public libraries, such as access to e-book lending, library funding, new technologies and advocacy.


“According to the American Library Association’s 2010-2011 Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study, more than 74 percent of libraries offer software and other resources to help patrons create resumes and employment materials, and 72 percent of libraries report that staff helped patrons complete online job applications.


“Public libraries not only provide free access to information, but also to e-books and other digital content. Over two-thirds (67.2 percent) of libraries now offer access to e-books, up 12 percent from two years ago. According to the e-book distributor OverDrive, library patrons checked out 35 million digital titles in 2011, up from 15 million circulations in 2010. Unfortunately, access to this valued resource is in jeopardy as several major publishers have decided not sell or license e-books to libraries, dramatically limiting the options available to readers.”


We mystery writers know that librarians are a writer’s best friends and that libraries are hard pressed, with cuts in funding and the whole book industry in flux and disarray. Sisters in Crime is now in its second year of offering its “We Love Libraries” grants: a drawing for $1,000 each month to a library that submits a photo of its staff members holding books by Sisters in Crime member authors, to be spent solely on acquiring books (not necessarily mysteries).


So while I hailed passersby—“Hi! Do you read mysteries?”—and offered them first-chapter chapbooks and bookmarks for Death Will Extend Your Vacation, my new mystery due out next month, free hardcover copies of my first book (I brought fifty, and I was determined not to take a single one home with me), and postcards promoting Outrageous Older Woman, my new CD (hey, why not? many of the librarians were in my demographic, ie old enough to appreciate my songs), I was also helping SinC Library Liaison Mary Boone and Liaison emerita Doris Ann Norris (who calls herself the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Librarian) encourage librarians to join Sisters in Crime themselves, let their digital name tags be swiped to enter drawings for goodie packets of mysteries (and incidentally join the SinC mailing list), and take information about applying for one of the grants.


I shared my two-hour slot at the SinC booth with fellow mystery authors Robin Hathaway, Elena Santangelo, and Merry Jones. I ran into Hank Phillippi Ryan in the blocks-long corridor before I even reached the exhibit hall and Jane Cleland at the registration desk. I left some chapbooks with the folks at the Cengage booth, the parent company of my current publisher, Five Star. Once my stint was over, I headed for the Booklist exhibit, lured by the promise of a wine and cheese party and encouraged by the fact that Booklist just gave Death Will Extend Your Vacation a good review. The corner area was packed. I spotted Otto Penzler and the Caroline half of Charles Todd, as well as Hank and Jane again, in the first thirty seconds.


But I hit the jackpot when I got to meet Tiffany Schofield, the Five Star person I’ve exchanged dozens of emails with but never met face to face before. She’s crucial to the launch of my book and getting copies to the right place at the right time (eg Malice), and I was thrilled to get a chance to talk with her in person. Luckily, she was equally thrilled. We were averaging a hug about every three minutes for a while there. I never did get any wine or cheese, but I drove back to New York a happy mystery writer.

The All-Important Cover

Elizabeth Zelvin

The cover of my new mystery, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, due out in April, is a collaboration between me and my publisher’s book designer.

When the book was accepted for publication, I was about to set off for Malice Domestic, which is one of the best places for an author of traditional mysteries to hand out bookmarks. Since it would be months until my manuscript reached the cover design stage, I did my own provisional cover and slapped it on a thousand bookmarks. Later, when I found this publisher invited authors to submit a possible image, I sent it along and was pleased when they used it. Not being a professional graphic designer, I never would have thought of using the fonts and colors of the text that they added to my photograph. Appropriately, it gives the impression of an old-fashioned postcard that you might buy at some beach boardwalk.


I’ve been creating images to represent my books and stories since the first time I needed a provisional bookmark. They’ve also come in handy to circulate an anthologized story in standalone chapbook form. I’ve given out hundreds at library conventions (ALA and PLA) and many more at fan conventions where I’ve had a story nominated for an award. When the advent of e-books created an ongoing need for covers supplied by the author, I already had a running head start.


Let’s talk about that severed hand on the cover of Death Will Extend Your Vacation. (You did notice it, I hope.) This is not the hand’s first starring role.

When I needed a cover for my short story, “Death Will Trim Your Tree,” I had a bright idea that sent me to my desktop to google “bloody hand.” You can buy anything on the Internet. I would have been happy with a whole arm, but I chose this severed hand because it looked realistic and the price was right. (The severed end is kind of disgusting, but I omit it from my photos. However, if I ever take to writing horror....)

It also works with my newest story, “Death Will Tank Your Fish.” I couldn’t work it into “Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down,” but for that I googled “kangaroo on couch” and found the perfect photo on the website of an animal refuge center in Australia, from which I received emailed permission to use it within an hour or two.

When I first started sending out my work and hobnobbing with published writers, I heard a lot about how important a good cover was to sales of a book and therefore to an author’s career. I also heard about publishers who changed book titles and provided hideous covers over the author’s dead bodies. The most memorable of these was a woman whose publisher threw a Halloween reference into the title—no Halloween in the book—and smacked a grinning orange pumpkin on the front, to the author’s horror when she saw the book in print. I heard a senior editor at the same publisher’s describe their cozy line as books of which “you can put a puppy or kitten on the cover, even if there are no puppies or kittens in the book.”


I was lucky to have my first publisher assign its top art director to my first two books.

David Rotstein (look at the back flap of any hardcover from Minotaur and you’ll probably see his name) had resources I don’t, as I learned when he told me he achieved the effect of a whiskey glass shattered by a bullet not through CGI, but by shooting an actual bullet at the glass and recording the impact with high-speed film. His cover for Death Will Get You Sober was nominated for an Anthony award, though it lost out to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as most award nominees did that year.


Now I have the rights back, I can’t use the original cover if I want to offer the book for e-readers. I don’t have a gun, so can’t shoot myself up a glass—and don’t really want to find out the hard way whether an imitating another image violates copyright. But I could lay a glass on its side with whiskey spilling out of it. Not real whiskey, since I couldn’t make it puddle. But maybe honey....

The Brooklyn Book Festival

Elizabeth Zelvin

I spent last Sunday at the Brooklyn Book Festival, an ambitious annual event that describes itself as follows:

The Brooklyn Book Festival is the largest free literary event in New York City presenting an array of literary stars and emerging authors who represent the exciting world of literature today. One of America’s premier book festivals, this hip, smart, diverse gathering attracts thousands of book lovers of all ages.

This year’s luminaries included Larry McMurtry, Terry McMillan, Jennifer Egan, John Sayles, Joyce Carol Oates, Walter Mosley, Jean Valentine, Jules Feiffer, and Pete Hamill. But I didn’t hear any of them speak. The New York chapters of both Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime had tables. Between the two, I was on my feet for several hours, schmoozing with both the passing book lovers and my fellow writers. I handed out at least a hundred bookmarks for Death Will Extend Your Vacation, my new book, which won’t be out till next spring. I even sold a decent number of my already published books.

Typically, given New York’s increasingly fickle weather (global warming doesn’t mean it’s always hot—it increases extremes), the day started out gray and blustery and gradually became one of those clear, sparkling fall afternoons for which New York is famous.

At the Sisters in Crime booth, the hot ticket item was Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices, an anthology of crime stories by chapter members, each set in a part of New York City (within the five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island) that probably doesn’t appear in any tourist guide. My story’s setting, the church basements of AA throughout the city, certainly doesn’t. Though a lifelong New Yorker, I had never heard of the Morbid Anatomy Library. One formerly well-kept secret, the High Line, is rapidly becoming a tourist attraction. Since its stunning renovation as a block-wide “mile-and-a-half-long elevated park, running through the West Side neighborhoods of the Meatpacking District, West Chelsea and Clinton/Hell's Kitchen,” it’s rapidly becoming a favorite of both locals and visitors. Every guest I’ve had from out of town or another country in the past year has been eager to see it. Anyhow, the settings have quite a range, and the anthology, which actually debuted at the Festival, sold briskly at a special event price.

Rock bottom bargains were the order of the day at the MWA table too, where my fellow authors included Rosemary Harris, Charles Salzberg, and Sheila York. There’s no doubt in my mind that thanks to Amazon, the amount people will pay for a book, especially a hardcover, has been permanently lowered. But as veteran self-promoting authors (and that means all of us) know, selling books is not necessarily the most important item on the agenda at a book event. We’re building readership every time we hand out a bookmark or encourage someone who says, “I’ll get it at the library” or “I’ll get it for my Kindle.” I had a chance to catch up with author Grace F. Edwards, who I wish still came regularly to MWA and SinC meetings. Rosemary had a productive chat on behalf of MWA with the author of the book publishing guide on About.com. Sheila got to meet a fan who squealed with delight to find that she could finally read the sequel to the first book in Sheila’s series, which she adored. That’s a peak experience for any author, on top of the pleasure of an afternoon in the sun, schmoozing with fellow writers and people who love books.

Larry McMurtry, Susan Isaacs, and me
I just learned this morning that my picture appears in illustrious company in an article about the Festival on About.com.