Margaret Maron's South

by Sandra Parshall

Every year, Margaret Maron’s latest Deborah Knott mystery is an automatic read for me. I don’t have to see reviews. I don’t have to know a thing about the plot. All that matters is that it’s a book about Judge Deborah Knott, who represents the modern South better than any character in current crime fiction.

I prefer that the books be set in Deborah’s home state of North Carolina or, failing that, another Southern state, so I wasn’t happy when I heard that Three-Day Town (2011) was set in New York City. I shouldn’t have worried. Deborah and her husband, Deputy Dwight Bryant, take the South with them wherever they go, and they’re the same people on the mean streets of New York as on the back roads of fictional Colleton County, NC. I’m glad they’re back home, though, in this year’s book, The Buzzard Table.

Authors tend toward two extremes when writing about the South. Some go for humor, playing up the eccentric Southern characters (especially the wacky women), the regional speech habits, and the quaint customs that linger from earlier times. Suspense and thriller writers see the South as a dark and dangerous place, steeped in stubborn prejudice, filled with corrupt politicians and ignorant savages straight out of Deliverance, a place where outsiders are resented and feared, where most people own guns and are quick to use them.

All these elements can be found to a degree in the South, but it would be hard to find one place that fits either stereotype perfectly. Margaret Maron knows that today’s South, like any other part of the nation, is neither idyllic nor hellish.
 
Judge Deborah Knott is an educated professional woman who speaks with a Southern drawl and isn’t embarrassed by folksy colloquialisms. Nothing matters more to her than family, and she has a big one: eleven older brothers, their children and significant others, plus aunts and uncles and cousins. Her husband, Dwight, can act and sound like a classic good ol’ boy, but he’s a smart, honest cop who can’t be corrupted by racism, favoritism or payoffs.

Margaret Maron’s South has racists and poverty, but it also has educated black people in positions of influence. It has gays and northern transplants and drug problems and kids who drink and drive and sometimes die as a result. It has cell phones and internet service. Her South is changing with the times while trying to hold onto traditions that give the region its special flavor and charm. In that way, it’s no different from any other part of the country.

When I read a Margaret Maron novel, I know I’m getting an accurate picture of the real South she lives in and loves. Her books have a deep-in-the-bone authenticity that I find in few other novels set in the South.

Thank you, Margaret. You are a treasure.

Best Reads of 2010

Elizabeth Zelvin

This is the time when we get to tally up and share with others our favorite reads of the preceding year. This year, I started making my list way back in January 2010, when I was still reading a few of the highly praised mysteries of 2009. I’ve been adding to it and winnowing it throughout 2010, and I think I’ve distilled it to the handful of books I absolutely loved reading. In one case, I got the hardcover by a favorite author the day it was published, read it straight through, then turned back to the beginning and read the whole thing again with equal relish. In another, a book and author I came upon by chance, I thought it was so exceptional that I devoted a whole blog to it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about readers in my years in the mystery community, it’s that every individual’s taste is different. You may hate the books I love, and vice versa. My own husband and I are yin and yang in this regard. Even with the narrow range of books that we may both pick up—a certain kind of high-quality historical and fantasy fiction—I get bored if the battles go on too long, while he gets bored if the relationships and feelings go on too long. (Same with movies, but that’s another story.) But my list is my list, and I want to write about why I think these particular books are so wonderful.

As I said, I wrote a whole blog about Michael Gruber’s The Book of Air and Shadows (2007), so I’ll repeat here only that it had all three elements of great novel writing: storytelling, writing, and characterization.

The same can be said of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryoburn (2010), the long-awaited new volume of the Vorkosigan saga, which I insist in including on my mystery list because one aspect of Bujold’s genius is the deft mixing of genres. Cryoburn is science fiction, mystery, galactic political thriller, and immensely satisfying character-driven novel all at once. Miles Vorkosigan and his family and friends are the kind of people readers like me fall in love with, wish they could meet and befriend, and hunger to hear more about. They are endearing, smart, and funny—intensely real, achingly delicious. I can read about characters like these till the cows come home, over and over.

Margaret Maron’s Christmas Mourning (2010), and her Judge Deborah Knott series in general, shares that characteristic, at a less intense and charismatic level, of endearing characters, of a world of family and friends that the reader would be delighted to belong to. Every time the Knotts sit around playing music, I wish I had been born into a family that did that. In this one, the mystery is neatly done and the personal elements enough to satisfy someone like me who (dare I admit this?) is really reading the book primarily for the relationships.

Also on my list is Sara Paretsky’s latest, Body Work (2010). Paretsky, just named a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America and the chief founding mother of Sisters in Crime, writes a protagonist, V.I. Warshawski, who is a different kind of smart from either Miles Vorkosigan or Judge Deborah and a more abrasive kind of endearing. I have to reread Paretsky’s books just to make sure I can follow the more brainy aspects of the plot, which often have to do with business or politics. I don’t exactly long to know V.I. personally, but I care about her and the circle of friends and supporters she’s gathered around herself. I admire her doggedness—she’s as persistent as, hmm, Rocky, in coming back after a knockout—I like the way she cares about her mother’s memory (and those last ruby glasses, or are we down to one?), and I adore her overt feminism. In the case of this new book, after reading the beginning, I settled into this meaty read with a sigh of satisfaction. Yes! Paretsky is still at the height of her powers; neither the tight plotting nor the development of this installment of the series character arc is going to let me down.

That’s not the whole list—more another time. What’s on your Best of 2010 list, and why?

Reading for Romance

Elizabeth Zelvin

I don’t write romance, but I read for it. No, I’m not confessing to a secret taste for bodice rippers. I read mostly mystery and some carefully chosen fantasy, SF, and historical novels. But what most of my favorites have in common, regardless of genre, is fully realized, endearing characters and meaningful relationships, especially though not exclusively romantic ones.

Looking first at my favorite mystery series, let’s take Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone books. I love Sharon, but I’ve never fully bought her relationship, now marriage, with Hy Ripinsky. My pick among those books is Broken Promise Land, when Sharon’s assistant, Rae Kelleher, falls in love with Sharon’s brother-in-law, country star Ricky Savage. Some of it is told from Rae’s point of view, and for me it evokes that achingly emotional phenomenon, falling in love. Now let’s take Margaret Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott series. Like Sharon, Deborah makes a series of wrong choices before she finds a keeper. In her case, it’s a guy she’s known her whole life, Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant. And what a delicious twist it is that she lets her inner pragmatist insist she’s settling for a marriage of convenience, while Dwight conceals the fact that he’s been in love with her for years.

Sometimes an author fails to allow romance to triumph or draws the suspense out to my increasing frustration. I don’t think I’ve ever quite forgiven P.D. James for not letting Adam Dalgliesh get together with Cordelia Gray. And I wanted to shake Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, or perhaps her protagonist, Detective Inspector Bill Slider, for several books in a row as he shirked breaking with his irritating wife and committing to his delightful girlfriend.

Several years on the mystery lovers’ e-list DorothyL have taught me that I share my tastes across genres with quite a few other mystery readers. Even the ever-vigilant list moderators will allow members to post about Dorothy Dunnett and Diana Gabaldon. Both write mysteries, but it’s their more popular series, in both cases historicals with just a touch of woo-woo, that are so darn good. Dunnett’s Francis Crawford of Lymond and Gabaldon’s Jamie Fraser both figured prominently in a hugely enjoyable discussion on the list of which fictional characters DLers would happily go to bed with.

Tellingly, the list included Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, who’s a terrific character and as much of a superhero as Lymond and Jamie, but not sexy and gorgeous like them. Miles is only four feet tall with a big head and a condition something like brittle bone disease—but he’s such a great guy that readers were ready to jump his bones. Virtually, of course. And it probably helps that we know how good he is in bed. The Vorkosigan books are science fiction by genre, though they often contain a mystery. My favorite, A Civil Campaign, does not. It doesn’t need one to carry the story: it’s the perfect cross between space opera and comedy of manners. And the romance between Miles and Ekaterin is very satisfying indeed. Bujold dedicates the book to Jane (Austen), Charlotte (Bronte), Dorothy (Sayers), and Georgette (Heyer), and I think she does her sources of inspiration proud.

Considering my tastes, you’d think I’d have a romance in my mystery, Death Will Get You Sober. But I don’t. My protagonist Bruce is too busy getting sober to fall in love, though he goes to bed once each with his ex-wife (whom readers will learn more about in a future book) and a witness. And if he did, both his sponsor and his best friend Jimmy would remind him that AA wisdom suggests no new relationships in the first year of sobriety. Bruce is one of those characters whose perch on the author’s shoulder is the driver’s seat. He won’t be hurried, and I can’t force him. In the second book, he has a romantic interlude, but it’s transitional for both partners. In the third, he’s attracted to a suspect, but it doesn’t work out. In book four, he meets someone who might become a girlfriend and a recurring character. But I don’t know for sure. He hasn’t told me yet.

So for now, I read for romance, but I don’t write it—yet.

Getting Motivated

By Darlene Ryan

Getting Motivated

Hugh Grant hanging out with Divine Brown. Donald Trump’s hair. Britney Spears lack of hair. If this were Jeopardy the question would be: “What the heck were you thinking?”

Take another look at your current manuscript. Are readers going to ask you that question? At some point in your story will they throw up their hands or just throw the book across the room?

Motivation. It’s one of the ways readers become invested in a character. Science fiction writer Nancy Kress was the fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine several years ago. I can’t remember her exact words, but she explained motivation more or less like this in one of her columns: In real life people do things for silly, illogical and outright weird reasons. Or for no reason at all. But in a novel, characters need good reasons for what they do--if you want to keep readers hooked. Believable, realistic characters—characters who feel like real people instead of paper cutouts, don’t just react to drive your story. They behave like the people you created them to be.

Have you ever watched one of those hokey old movies where the heroine is alone in an isolated house when the power goes out? And of course, what does she do? She heads down into the pitch-dark cellar to check the fuses where the serial killer/vampire/escaped-prisoner-with-a-chainsaw is waiting. And watching we groan or throw our popcorn at the screen because who does that? In fact, who hangs out alone in creepy isolated houses in the middle of nowhere in the first place?

If you want your main character to do something that she (and anyone with any common sense, like your readers) wouldn’t normally do, you need to give her some compelling motivation—a reason that makes sense for that character in that circumstance.

Maybe the heroine is at the spooky house in the woods because she’s hiding from her ex who dislocated her shoulder and broke two of her ribs the last time she saw him. Maybe she heads for the basement when the lights go out because she knows he’s in the house, she knows he’ll follow her down there, she’s banking on that because she’s set up a little booby-trap on the fourth step from the top.

Or maybe the heroine is at the house because she needed a week away from her mother who keeps trying to get her to marry a nice boy and make babies before all her eggs shrivel up to dried out DNA. And maybe she heads to the basement when the power goes out because she knows there’s a quart of Rocky Road down there in the freezer and she just got off the phone with Mom.

Motivation can get tricky in mysteries where the main character isn’t involved in law enforcement in some way. Remember Jessica Fletcher? Okay, I confess I watched the show, but c’mon, the woman fell over a dead body every week and managed to catch the killer as well. After a while people should have been running the second they saw her coming. This is where you need to watch out for the lame excuse masquerading as motivation. If I see the guy who murdered my best friend while I’m shopping for shoes at the mall, yeah, I want him caught. But I’m going to dial 911, not chase him through the end of season clearance racks at the Gap.

Tim Cockey, author of the Hitchcock Sewell mysteries (Hearse of a Different Color, Backstabber) made Hitchcock an undertaker so the character would have a legitimate reason for being around so many dead people. Add to that a weakness for beautiful women in trouble and a deep loyalty to the friends who make up Hitch’s “family” and Cockey has some decent motivation for his character always being tied up in a murder investigation.

Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott (Hard Row, Bootlegger’s Daughter) is a judge with a huge rowdy family, a husband in law enforcement and a father who’s often on the wrong side of the law—lots of ties to crime and lots of motivation to get mixed up in murder

Keep in mind motivation is different for everyone. A mother won’t do something that puts her children in danger, but she’ll face any danger to protect them. A loner will take different risks that someone with a big circle of friends. A younger person will probably take more chances that someone older--who is more likely to act on loyalty and longtime friendship.

Give your character a logical reason to act, a legitimate reason to get involved. And if you’re sending her down into the cellar make sure there’s a quart of Rocky Road down there in the freezer.

Since we're on the subject of motivation I'm going to give you all a chance--or possibly more than once chance--to find out what makes the average man act the way he does. Tell me what's the lamest motivation you've ever come across in a book or a movie in comments, or just say hello, and I'll enter your name for a chance to win The Slime Men Do, by Humble Howard Glassman--real stories from women about the crappy things some men do. For each copy of Slime that's sold a contribution will be made to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation--and this month happens to be Breast Cancer Awareness month. So here's where it gets fun. If there are more than 20 comments here I'll give away two copies of the book. More than 40 comments I'll make it three copies, more than 60, four copies. One comment per person per email address please. And no, comments from my blogmates don't count. You have until midnight Sunday to comments. Check back Tuesday to find out who won.

Read A Mystery, Get A Life

Elizabeth Zelvin

As a reader and a writer, I love a mystery. But why? Do I love it for the puzzle, the slow unfolding of the clues and evidence that will show me at the end who done it, er, did it? Do I love it for the theme of wrongs righted and justice done? For the plot, the necessity that in every mystery, unlike certain literary novels, something happens? All of these are pleasures associated with mysteries. However, none of the above provides the burning desire to plunk my money down the minute a new hardcover by a favorite author comes out. I’m a hardcore series reader. I love to return to protagonists I already know and revisit the worlds they inhabit, both in new books and by rereading. And I’ve finally figured out what clinches the attraction.

On the back cover of Margaret Maron’s latest Judge Deborah Knott book, there’s a quote from a review by the Associated Press: “The considerable strength of Maron’s writing lies in giving her sleuth a life.” I read that and thought: “That’s IT!” Judge Deborah is one of my favorites for just that reason. I feel the same about Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak, and a number of others.

If I met Deborah or Sharon in real life, I think I’d get along with them just fine. I’ve certainly wished, if not for eleven brothers, at least for a family that got together to make music the way Deborah’s does. I’ve played the guitar since I was 13, and in my folksinging days, my family had a tendency not to pay much attention beyond asking why I couldn’t sing “something more cheerful.” Deborah herself might have liked my mother, who was a pioneering woman lawyer. As for Sharon, I can empathize with her slow transformation from Sixties free spirit with the All Souls Legal Cooperative to businesswoman with a heart and a terrific team.

Kate Shugak, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t think much of me. I’m not rugged enough for an Alaskan, especially someone like the ultra-competent and indomitable Kate. The one Alaskan I do know, a therapist from Kansas, hikes up glaciers in the rain on her lunch hour. When I visited a number of years ago, I couldn’t keep up. Kate (and presumably Stabenow) shares my taste in reading, though. She’d be great on DorothyL. She also has a fantastic bunch of friends.

I suspect those friendships are the key. Like many Americans of my generation, I hunger for community. I’ve had a taste of it at various times in my life, but time, my big-city location (I live in Manhattan), and the nature of life in the 21st century have left me with not only a diminished family, but also friends who are widely scattered and not known to each other. Each of these fictional heroines has a circle of friends, and vicariously, once I open the book, so do I.