Oh brother, oh sister

Sandra Parshall

Troublesome siblings are everywhere in crime fiction. Evil twins, bad-boy brothers, sisters who have shamed the family. Sibling problems drive the plots of a lot of mysteries and thrillers.

Since 82% of Americans have siblings, and some degree of rivalry is the rule rather than the exception, it’s not surprising that this is such rich soil for writers – or that brother/sister problems strike a chord with readers.

My first published novel, The Heat of the Moon, has inspired a lot of readers to confide very personal things about their own lives. It’s a heady experience to have someone tell me, “I never really understood my relationship with my sister until I read your book.” My character Rachel’s ambivalent feelings toward her younger sister, Michelle, who is clearly their mother’s favorite, seem authentic to readers, and I’m always glad to hear that I “got it right” even though I was just trying to tell a good story, not lay bare the psyches of strangers.

Rachel’s sister is an angel compared to some fictional siblings. Cops in novels may be burdened with bad-seed brothers or sisters they’d like to keep secret. For example, in Denise Mina’s Still Midnight, her cop heroine dreads the collision of her professional duty with her shady brother’s illegal business. It’s only a small part of the story, but anyone who has ever cringed at a sibling’s misdeeds can relate.

Lisa Scottoline’s protagonist, attorney Bennie Rosato, is plagued by an evil twin who has burst into her life and wreaked havoc in two books, Mistaken Identity and Dead Ringer. This is sibling rivalry to the nth degree: Bennie’s twin wants her disgraced and dead.

The previously unknown sibling has also been used in a lot of novels. For example, Tess Gerritsen’s medical examiner, Dr. Maura Isles, didn’t know she had an identical twin until she found her mirror image sitting dead in a car outside her house at the beginning of Body Double.

Gerritsen’s Detective Jane Rizzoli has a less dramatic but painfully believable sibling problem. Her mother dotes on Jane’s worthless brother, while constantly finding fault with Jane and discounting her professional achievements. Only when Jane marries and produces a baby does her mother feel she has accomplished something admirable.

True, some protagonists have great sibs, untainted by competition for their parents’ love. Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon is close to her sister. Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott has almost a dozen brothers and adores them all. Others confide in siblings or even solve crimes with them. Conflict is more common, though, and often more realistic.

Developmental psychologists have observed that sibling rivalry starts as early as the first year of life. Even at that age, a kid can tell if he’s getting the smallest servings of mom’s attention and affection, or if he’s somehow being treated as special, more loved and admired than other children in the family. A child incorporates those differences, whether favorable or unfavorable, into his view of himself.

These early influences can make us stronger and prepare us to live in the wider world – or they can establish a pattern of juvenile rivalry that will last a lifetime. Many siblings forgive and forget and become friends as they grow up, but some remain competitive forever. How many middle-aged sisters do you know who argue over which will inherit some treasured possession from their mother? How many middle-aged brothers do you know who constantly try to outdo each other professionally and personally? How many adults, with children of their own, still dread family holiday gatherings because they know they’ll end up reenacting old rivalries and competing for their parents’ approval?

Is it any wonder that so many real-life murders are committed by relatives of the victims? And that toxic families are at the heart of so many crime novels?

Do you have a favorite “toxic family” mystery? Or a story of real-life sibling rivalry you can share?

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?

Say Cheese--The Photographer, Tess Gerritsen and Me

(Although I've been a guest here before, this is the first of my regular posts. Sandy, Lonnie, Sharon, Liz and Julia have invited me to join Poe's Deadly Daughters on a regular basis. (Thanks, guys!) I'll be here the first weekend of each month. I'm taking a break from writing for teens and working on an adult mystery and I'll be sharing some of my experiences along the way.)

I should start by saying I hate having my picture taken. Not dislike. Hate. Loathe. Despise. I blame that on the development of Kodak’s Brownie camera. Simple camera—in theory. Basically, it was a brown, box shaped camera with a lens, a viewfinder, and film. It was so simple anyone could use it, and did. So if it wasn’t my mother lining us grubby faced kids in a row somewhere and telling us, “Say cheese,” it was someone else’s Mom. And we’d smile…and smile…and smile while she moved us “a little to the left,” or “just a bit to the right,” or “a couple of steps closer,” until by the time the picture was taken those smiles looked nothing like smiles. In fact generally we’d look like a row of miniature Cesar Romero’s doing the Joker on the Batman TV series. (Yes, I know Jack Nicholson also played the Joker, but I grew up in the 60’s.) Overall, I’m just a little paranoid about having my picture taken.

But it was time for a new author photo, so I decided that not only was I going to have a new photo, I was going to have a “famous author” photo, the kind of picture that would make me look like I was a cosmopolitan world traveler instead of someone who read Cosmo in the check-out line at Wal-mart. I was going to have an author photo like Tess Gerritsen.

Okay, so Tess is of Chinese ancestry and I’m not, but my daughter is. And Tess is American and I’m Canadian, but she lives in Maine which is close to Canada. And she’s a New York Times best-selling author and I’m not. (Yet.) But I read the New York Times. (Sometimes.) Overall, if you squint a little, there’s not that much difference between us.

My friend, Kevin, who is a photographer, agrees to take the pictures. I considered letting Mr. Wonderful take them, but when he takes pictures the subjects always look like they were standing in Saskatchewan—which would be fine with me, but according to my publisher in an author photo people should actually be able to see my face.

Tess, I discover, has two author photos on her website and she looks elegant and worldly in both of them. My favorite is on her blog. She’s in a white shirt, smiling with her arms crossed over her chest. I can do that.

Problem # 1: I can’t get my hair to hang like hers does. I don’t have that much hair. I briefly fantasize about extensions. Since I live down the road from the middle of nowhere, the only supplementary hair I can find is at the dollar store. It’s very black and very curly, and when I hold it up to my head I flash back to the summer when I was eight and my mother decided to give my stick straight hair just a “slight wave” with the help of a Toni home perm kit. I spent the summer looking like Michael Jackson’s illegitimate white-bread sister. Stick me in a pair of bell bottoms and a paisley shirt and I could have been grooving in between Tito and Jermaine.

Okay, so the hair is out. I can still do everything else. I have a white shirt, a designer shirt. Well, it’s designer in the sense that I bought it at the mall as opposed to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. I find the shirt at the back of the closet and put it on. And remember why I never wear the thing.

Problem # 2: The blouse zippers instead of closing with buttons, and that zipper bulges out in the front so I look as though I have a third boob right between the real girls and about twice their size.

No white shirt either. I go back to Tess’s website and study her picture again. The woman has no wrinkles, I notice. Would it be in bad taste to post a comment on her blog asking what kind of wrinkle cream she uses? I decide if I can’t copy her hair and her shirt I can copy her confident woman of the world pose. Anyway, if you squint a little, there’s really not that much difference between us.

In the meantime I stick some green painter’s tape across the wrinkles between my eyebrows in the hope that they somehow flatten out before Kevin arrives to start taking pictures. (Don’t bother trying it. It doesn’t work.)

Kevin arrives with some nifty gadgets in his camera bag including a filter he claims will make me look as though I’ve been lit like Barbara Streisand. He suggests I wear my pink shirt because the color will look good next to my face. Since the shirt makes me look skinny I agree.

I pose for shots inside. I pose for shots outside. I fold my arms, smile and think, “New York Times best-seller list.” Kevin takes the film to be developed.

Problem # 3: I look like an after model in an osteoporosis commercial. Or Quasimodo in the bell tower. If they were both lit like Barbara Streisand.

“I want to look like a famous author,” I wail to Mr. Wonderful.

“I think you look beautiful just the way you are,” he says, kissing the top of my head.

“Let’s go take some shots in the park,” Kevin suggests.

The sun comes out. Kevin poses me, arms propped on the low stone wall surrounding one of the artesian wells in the park. I smile and think, “Please don’t let my arms be in bird poop.”

The finished photos look very good—no elegant shirt or cosmopolitan pose. Just me, looking like me.

I go back to Tess Gerritsen’s blog for one more look at the famous author photo. I hold my picture next to the computer monitor and take a minute to read the blog. Tess went to Turkey on vacation. I’m going to Wal-mart to find something that gets out bird poop. Other than that if you squint a little, there’s not that much difference between the two of us.

Can Women Write Thrillers?

Sandra Parshall

“A testosterone-fueled thriller!”

How many times have you seen those words in a book review or ad?

And how many times have you seen a book described as “an estrogen-fueled thriller”?

Female authors who are accepted as thriller writers are still relatively rare. One reason may be that publishers, knowing a lot of men won’t read women authors, try to direct marketing of those authors’ work toward female readers. If a man writes an action-packed crime novel with sex in it, the book is called a testosterone-fueled thriller. If a woman writes an action-packed crime novel with sex in it, the book is likely to be labeled romantic suspense, guaranteeing that the majority of male readers won’t touch it with a barge pole.

I have no hard data to support this claim, but I’m going to say it anyway because I’ve seen it happen often enough to make me believe it’s true: agents, editors, and readers apply different standards to men’s and women’s books. A friend of mine wrote a thriller that was filled with action, murder, and plot twists. The protagonist was a strong female who knew how to protect herself and take out a bad guy when she needed to. Agents who read the manuscript either didn’t find the character’s actions believable or felt the book should be more interior, with bigger doses of the protagonist’s feelings. You know, more of a woman’s book. “I’ve considered rewriting to make her a man,” my friend says, “but then what would I do with the cute priest who’s the love interest? Make him a nun?”

Does a real difference exist between thrillers written by women and those produced by men? If you put a male name on a book, as some women writers do when they opt to use pseudonyms or their initials, will anybody be able to guess the author’s gender from the text? Do women overload their books with romance and family life? Do they use a softer tone and eschew graphic violence? Do their books focus only on female characters and their peculiarly female concerns?

If you think the answer is yes to all of the above, I have only this to say to you: P.J. Tracy. That’s a pseudonym for not just one woman but two, a mother-daughter writing team. I see a lot of similarities, beyond the Minnesota setting, between the Tracy novels and John Sandford’s Prey series, but I’m willing to bet that some male Sandford fans won’t read “Tracy” because they know the authors are a mother and a daughter.

While I’m naming names, consider Tess Gerritsen. True, her cop (Jane Rizzoli) and medical examiner (Maura Isles) are women, but Gerritsen also includes the viewpoint of Rizzoli’s husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, and her two women are as tough and businesslike as any male characters you’ll ever encounter. She doesn’t shy away from violence either. I wonder, though, how many men have never tried Gerritsen’s books because a woman’s name is on the covers and the two main characters are female. The fans she already has are enough to put her books on bestseller lists for a while. But the thrillers that make it onto the lists and stay there week after week, sometimes month after month, tend to be those written by men. The thrillers that get the most review attention are, with few exceptions, the “testosterone-fueled” kind.

Is this a holdover from the time when men ran the world and women were expected to smile and bake cookies? Or does something basic in human nature resist the idea of women writing about the darkest side of life? Why is it that some men simply cannot be entertained by a book if they know it was written by a woman?

I recently confessed that I avoid reading crime novels from foreign countries. I vowed to make more of an effort, because I realize I’m missing a lot of entertaining books. Men who won’t read thrillers by women are also missing some good stuff. If I thought any of those men were reading this blog, I would encourage them to be adventurous and give female thriller writers a try. The danger of estrogen contamination has been greatly exaggerated.

The Naming of Characters

Sandra Parshall

T.S. Eliot wrote, “The naming of cats is a difficult matter,” and as a lifelong cat-owner, I agree -- but choosing a name for a fictional character takes difficulty to a whole new level. It’s a lot like naming a child. The recipient will live with your decision forever, and if you make a mistake the consequences won’t be pretty.

A baby, of course, is named before the parents have any idea how the kid will turn out. Will little Angelina develop into a tattooed hellion? Will Grace be a hopeless klutz? Or will their names in some way help to shape the people they become? I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, has spent a breathtaking amount of money studying such questions, but fortunately writers don’t have to wonder. We can form the characters, then give them names that suit. We can try out as many names as we like before deciding.

A character’s name has to do a lot of heavy lifting:

It should evoke personality. If a guy is always called Robert, never Bobby or even Bob, what does that say about him?

If ethnicity is important to the story, the name should convey that too. But you don’t have to call every Hispanic character Jose Gonzales. A little effort will turn up less common names that still tell the reader how to see the person.

A name can be a quick way to signal social status. I am not brave or foolish enough to reel off a list of low-class names and risk the fallout, but you know what I mean.

A name can tell us a character’s approximate age. How many toddlers do you know who are named Hortense or Archibald? How many 80-year-old women have you met who are named Britney or Morgan? The internet allows writers to search databases such as www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (compiled from Social Security records) and www.babycenter.com/general/ to find out what a character born in a certain year might have been named. Because I prefer classic names rather than the trendy concoctions that are going to seem laughable when their owners hit middle age and beyond, I’m happy to note that Emma has been the most popular name for baby girls in the U.S. for several years. We may have Ross and Rachel on Friends to thank for this. (I have a five-year-old named Emma, but although she believes herself to be an unusually hirsute little girl, she’s actually of the feline persuasion.) All those tiny Emmas, though, are growing up with a nearly equal number of girls named Madison. Aiden was the top male name in 2006, followed by Jacob, Ethan, Ryan, and Matthew. What will Madison and Aiden call their children twenty-five years from now?

The classics fit people of any age, but if the first name is a common one, the last might have to do double duty to give the character distinction. Kate is one of the most common names for female protagonists in mysteries, followed closely by all the variations of Katherine/Catherine/Kathleen -- Kat/Cat/Kathy/Katie/Kay. But Kate Shugak is singular, and so is Kay Scarpetta. In my new book, Disturbing the Dead, I named a lead character Tom Bridger, pairing a first name that conveys a solid, down-to-earth personality with a last name that is common among Melungeons in the Appalachians. The name Bridger is also a metaphor for the position that Tom, a half-Melungeon deputy sheriff, occupies between two segments of his mountain community. The reader may never think about this, but I have.

Sometimes a perfect name comes to a writer through sheer serendipity. When Tess Gerritsen was writing a book titled The Surgeon, she contributed to a charity auction by allowing a reader to purchase naming rights for a minor character, a female medical examiner. The reader named Dr. Maura Isles after a real person. The character grew in importance in subsequent books, and she grew into her name, which perfectly conveys the image of an elegant woman who is isolated within herself.

While searching for the perfect monikers for our characters, writers have to keep some no-no’s in mind: nothing that is impossible for the reader to pronounce; no two names starting with the same letter, lest the poor reader become confused; as few nicknames as possible, again to avoid confusion. Short, one-word names always have the edge, at least in English-language crime fiction. Look at a few U.S., Canadian, and British mystery novels. How many names of more than two or three syllables do you see? How many truly unusual names do you see? You could say this is laziness on the part of writers who don’t want to type long or difficult names again and again, and you might be half-right, but it’s also true that a mystery seems to move faster if everyone has a short, easy name.

A name is the most personal thing about a character, and the choice is not one the writer makes lightly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could exercise the same discretion over our own names? As innocent babies, we have to take whatever label is slapped on us, whether it fits or not. But most names, amazingly enough, turn out to be good fits. How about yours? Do you love it, hate it, wish you could change it? What name would you have given yourself, and why?