Just like me...?

Sandra Parshall

I always feel a certain amount of quiet glee when I listen to world-famous writers talk about their years of rejection, their tendency to procrastinate before starting work each day, the “What if I can’t do it again?” fear they sometimes feel when they finish a novel.

Ah, I think. They’re just like me!

Well, except for the world-famous part. And the top-10 bestseller part. And then there’s the million-dollar advance part.

But beyond those frivolous aspects of their lives, they are simply writers who have to sit down alone at their keyboards and somehow produce made-up stories that people will pay to read. That isn’t easy for anybody, unless they happen to be James Patterson or Nora Roberts (who recently published her 200th novel, is only 61, and will probably continue writing several books a year for the next 40 years).

At the recent Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesvile, I heard three superstars of mystery/suspense talk about all the things that make them just like the rest of us humble wordsmiths. 

Jeffery Deaver, who writes the Lincoln Rhyme mysteries, spoke at the Crime Wave lunch and kept everyone laughing with his tale of false starts and rejections before he settled on the kind of books he should be writing and learned enough about the craft to make them publishable. Deaver’s hero is a prime example of what mystery editors mean when they say they want something fresh and different. Rhyme is a former detective, a genius at crime scene examination – and a quadraplegic. He still uses his brilliant mind to solve crimes, and anybody who dares to pity him risks being turned to stone by his glare or a sharp rebuke. Once Deaver had the character, he started selling.

Ellen Crosby, author of the Virginia Wine Country Mysteries, did a great job of interviewing Steve Berry and Lisa Gardner on Friday night at the festival and coaxing them to reveal their work habits, good and bad. I interviewed Berry, author of the Cotton Malone novels, last year for the International Thriller Writers newsletter, so I already knew a good part of his story. But that interview was conducted via e-mail, and his charming southern accent came as a surprise when I heard him speak. Berry wrote for 12 years, accumulated 85 rejections, and quit three times before he sold his first novel. Like Deaver, he took awhile to discover his genre. Reading The Da Vinci Code sparked the revelation he needed. Since then he’s written more than a dozen bestsellers with sweeping international plots that dip into history. (Dan Brown is now a personal friend.)

Lisa Gardner, author of the D.D. Warren novels, the Pierce Quincy/Rainie Connor series, and other suspense titles, is one of my favorites. She is so personable and funny that I couldn’t hate her when she said she sold the first book she wrote and has never endured rejection. She endeared herself to me by confessing that “I procrastinate in every possible way” before beginning a day’s writing. She is “totally addicted to computer games” like solitaire. On some days, she’s capable of wasting virtually all of her writing time. Then around 2:30 in the afternoon she realizes her kids will be home from school in half an hour, and “in the next twenty-nine minutes, I can be amazingly productive.”

Berry has a goal of writing 1,000 words a day. He swears that when he’s out on the golf course he’s plotting in his head, not procrastinating. He did his early writing in “the total chaos of a law office” and still finds writing in a silent house difficult at times. He’s been known to seek out his wife, Elizabeth, and “aggravate her” into a squabble just to bring a little tension into his writing atmosphere. 

Gardner finds the first 100 pages of a new book the hardest to write, and during this period research serves as a fine form of procrastination. Because Berry’s books rely heavily on history, he can justify traveling all over the world to gather material before he dives into a new book. Gardner writes plot points on index cards and spreads them on the floor and scrambles them to find the best sequence of events. Berry also uses index cards to keep track of his plot, but his cards are in a computer file.

Both Gardner and Berry have written their share of violent scenes, but Berry says he gets the most complaints from readers when he deals with religion. He recalls “a woman screaming at me at an event” because she felt he had harmed the Catholic Church. It’s only fiction, he pointed out. The Catholic Church will not live or die because of something he writes in a thriller. He also heard complaints from readers when a dog was sacrificed in one of his books. Three human beings died in the same chapter, but nobody complained about that. Now, he says, he won’t kill an animal or a child in a book.

Her readers, Gardner said, seem to be tolerant when she takes them to “bad places” as long as she brings them back and leaves them in a good place with a satisfying and hopeful resolution. She doesn’t write noir, in which the situation is often worse at the end than at the beginning.

I enjoyed being on a panel and seeing friends in Charlottesville, but the highlights were Deaver’s talk on Saturday and Ellen’s interview of Lisa Gardner and Steve Berry on Friday evening. For a little while, at least, I could feel a kinship with these superstars of crime fiction and think, They’re just like me.

Some Like It Hot

Sandra Parshall

Do you take the temperature of the books you read?

I can’t help classifying crime novels by the amount of emotional heat they generate. Some stories have clever plots but require a minimum of personal involvement on the reader’s part. Those are the cool books. Others plunge you deep into the characters’ trouble-filled lives, and “hot” is the only way to describe the experience.

Cozies are, by their very nature, warm to slightly cool. Humor, especially when it borders on farce, has a cooling effect because it distances the story from the real world, where the events surrounding murder are seldom funny. That’s not a knock on cozies and humorous mysteries but an acknowledgment of their purpose: to entertain and divert without leaving the reader feeling wrung-out.

You might think thrillers would all be at the opposite temperature extreme, but that’s not the case. In techno-thrillers, the fate of the entire world may be at stake, but the story often remains an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional experience. For me, political suspense usually feels just as cold as a techno-thriller, which is why I avoid crime novels with flags on the covers.

The kind of book I enjoy most gets to me at a visceral level and lives up to its hype as “riveting from start to finish.” I don’t want to merely read about the characters’ ride through hell; I want to go along on the trip.

Tess Gerritsen at her best pulls me into her stories and leaves me breathless. Thomas Cook’s novels are quieter but intense and spellbinding.

Lisa Gardner and Greg Iles both write hot but include patches of cool writing that provide a few minutes of relief and relaxation before they heat up again.

Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine’s books are variable, but some of her psychological suspense novels, such as Going Wrong, The Lake of Darkness, and The Bridesmaid, are intensely creepy and gripping. Definitely hot, even though her prose is spare and might look cool at first glance.

P.D. James is usually cool all the way, although she has written a few passages from victims’ viewpoints that can raise the temperature of a book as well as the reader’s pulse rate.

Stephen White is a cool writer whose main character, a psychologist like White himself, is always thinking and reasoning.

Elizabeth George’s writing is warm when she’s in Barbara Havers’s viewpoint or that of a victim, but when she switches to Tommy Lynley or Simon St. James, the writing goes cold and cerebral even when they’re agonizing over the women they love.

When a book has a strong impact on me, I don’t usually slow down to wonder how the writer achieved that effect, but I’ll go back later to analyze it and, I hope, learn something I can use to make my own writing powerful. “Hot” writing explores primal emotions: love, hate, fear, jealousy, longing. Sensory details abound – readers always know how a character’s body, not just her mind, is reacting to an experience, and we always know how her world looks, smells, tastes, feels, sounds. Hot writing isn’t necessarily more violent than a cool story, but menace lurks everywhere, and when violence does erupt it is gut-wrenching and real, with nothing left out or sanitized. This is the kind of writing that reminds you how unpleasant murder is.

The genre of crime fiction has something for everybody. Books written with cool semi-detachment are as popular as those that shake you and leave you drained. Some readers, myself included, welcome an occasional cool book after a steady diet of high-emotion tales, and reading a warm cozy now and then resets my concept of what is normal so I don’t begin believing that everybody in the world is sick and vengeful. I’m not sure that many devoted cozy readers cross over to the dark side, though.

To each his own. But when I open the cover of a new book, nothing pleases me more than a blast of heat from its pages.

Do you see a cool/warm/hot pattern in your own reading?

Summer Reading

Sandra Parshall

Why do booksellers and reviewers talk about “summer reading” and “summer books” as if everyone spends June, July, and August lazing by a pool or on the beach, book in hand? Do you know anyone that lucky? For most of us, life and work go on pretty much as usual during the hot months. My summer reading is a lot like my winter reading -- relegated to little snatches of spare time. I’m more likely to listen to an audio book for an hour or two while I do other things than I am to settle in a chair with a book for an entire evening.

Here are some of the books that have been getting my seriously divided attention this summer.

Hide by Lisa Gardner: I will read anything Lisa Gardner writes, and this new book has become one of my favorites. Bobby Dodge, the Massachusetts state cop from Alone, returns, and he’s investigating the murders of six girls whose skeletons are found in a pit at an abandoned mental hospital. Evidence points to a killer Bobby had believed to be long dead. To complicate matters, after one skeleton is publicly identified as that of Annabelle Granger, the real Annabelle, now an adult, appears to correct the mistake and explain how the victim came to be wearing her necklace. The investigation widens to include Annabelle’s background. She grew up in hiding, her parents whisking her from place to place to escape a danger she never understood. In the course of Bobby’s investigation, Annabelle learns the truth about her family’s dark past and realizes that she is still in danger. Gardner has a delightfully twisted mind, and the complications and surprises she produces are many and convoluted. An unusually good suspense novel.

Trashed by Alison Gaylin is pure fun from beginning to end. The author’s first hardcover, after two paperback originals and an Edgar nomination, Trashed introduces accidental Hollywood tabloid reporter Simone Glass. She moves to Los Angeles to work for a respectable publication, but when that prospect evaporates, she’s desperate enough to take a job on a sleazy tabloid. She quickly learns that her editor doesn’t share her perception of what is newsworthy. Her first assignment, searching a star’s trash, turns up evidence that connects the actress to a murder, but Simone’s editor dismisses this development as uninteresting. What readers really want, he says, is proof of the star’s drug abuse. Simone stubbornly pursues the murder clues that keep popping up and ultimately puts her own life in danger. Trashed will be available from NAL Obsidian the first week of September, and in August I’ll have an interview with author Alison Gaylin in this space.

The Last Nightingale by Anthony Flacco is an impressive debut mystery. Set in San Francisco, the story begins minutes before the massive earthquake and the resulting fire that destroyed much of the city in 1906. Sgt. Randall Blackburn is walking back to police headquarters after his night shift when the earth cracks open beneath his feet and chaos erupts. At the same time, in a relatively unscathed part of the city, a serial killer slaughters the Nightingale family while twelve-year-old Shane, an adopted son, hides in a cupboard. In the days following the earthquake and the Nightingale murders, Blackburn and the psychologically damaged Shane team up to find the killer. Flacco’s descriptions of the earthquake and its aftermath are superb and the plotting is clever. I look forward to the second book in this series. The Last Nightingale is published by Ballantine in trade paperback, so you can take a chance on this new mystery writer at relatively low cost.

A while back, I vowed to overcome my bias against mysteries set in foreign countries where English is not the dominant language. I promptly relapsed and didn’t make good on my pledge until advance copies of two books, one Swedish and one French, fell into my hands. Although they’re very different stories, each excellent in its way, they have a common element: like Gardner’s Hide, they bring back killers the detectives have faced in the past.

Never End by Ake Edwardson is latest in a bestselling series of Swedish police procedurals set in the coastal city of Gothenberg. As the city suffers through a brutal heat wave, Chief Inspector Erik Winter recognizes in several new cases the work of a rapist-murderer he failed to catch years before. In a spare style, with few literary flourishes, the author creates a forboding atmosphere and builds suspense in both the professional and personal ordeals of the sympathetic, realistic characters. Trade paperback from Penguin.

Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand by Fred Vargas is the latest winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s International Dagger and the third in this bestselling French series to be published in the U.S. Commissaire Adamsberg, chief of police in Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, believes that serial killer Judge Fulgence is long dead -- but a new murder bears his unmistakable mark. Adamsberg’s insistence on chasing a ghost eventually makes him a suspect in the murder. Vargas (who is female, in case that matters to anyone) writes quirky characters who view the world from an ironic and often darkly funny perspective. Even if it didn’t have a compelling story, this book would be worth reading for the prose and the characters. Trade paperback from Penguin.

Books on my must-read list for the rest of the summer are Giles Blunt’s By the Time You Read This and Ruth Rendell’s The Water’s Lovely.

What are you reading this summer? Have you discovered any great new-to-you writers? Do you have more time to read in the summer than in other seasons?