Sticks and stones, etc...

By Lonnie Cruse

Wow, I'm blown away by my Poe sisters' blog posts this week. "Voice," "titles," "Don'ts," are all terrific subjects, which brings me to mine, "words."

Yesterday I ranted on my own blog about a news story I read on Yahoo! reporting that Santas across the country are being encouraged to say "Ha ha ha" instead of the traditional "Ho ho ho" because the latter *might* be offensive to women. Trust me, I'm totally in favor of politically correctness in our speech and NOT offending anyone, but really, give me a break! Couldn't "Ha ha ha " be equally offensive to Haitians or animal Handlers or Hairless people. And what about a certain snack company? Shouldn't they change the name of their suddenly politically incorrect snack cakes? Where was I? Oh yeah. Words.

Writers stress over words: Too many . . . the manuscript must be cut, too few . . . really must add a subplot. Too many adverbs . . . must reword. Too many passive verbs . . . shriek, must find more actives. Writers sit, and we write, and we re-write, and we create puzzles, hoping we haven't been so obvious that the reader figures it out in Chapter Two, or so obtuse the reader accuses us of cheating when the ending is revealed. We toss in red herrings and blush at how obvious they are . . . to us. We create characters who suddenly stand up and refuse to do what we've typed on the page for them to do, insisting on going the opposite direction. Sigh. But mostly we struggle for the RIGHT words to tell our story in such a way as to capture the attention of a reader on page one and keep it to page 231 (assuming the writer can come up with that many pages.)

For as long as men and women have been on the earth, we've been telling each other stories intent on teaching, entertaining, frightening, sucking the reader into our world, and whatever else we can accomplish. And we do it only with words. No other weapons involved. Because words are the most powerful weapons we have. They hurt, they kill, but they also heal. Personally, I want mine to heal.

Some stories are as powerful as bazookas, changing lives, making a difference. But for my money, even the simplest story, told well, changes lives, even if it only makes us chuckle, lightens our load for those few minutes.

Do you have a story to tell? Words inside you, screaming to get out? But you haven't ever had anything published, never gone to journalism school, aren't a "real" writer, afraid the author police will kick down your door if you so much as dare to write the words Chaper One on a piece of paper? Nonsense. Write it down. Get it out. And to steal a phrase: If you write it they will read it. Even if it's only your family, someone will read it. And you can take classes, join writer's groups, hone your craft. Remember, even the likes of Austen, King, Hemingway, etc, were all unpublished at one time.

Choose words, the right words. Change lives. Even if it's only for a moment.

The Indefinable Quality of Voice

Elizabeth Zelvin

If you ask agents and editors what single quality draws them to a manuscript by a new author, the majority of them, at least in my experience, will say “voice.” A strong writer’s literary voice is hard to describe. It may or may not be hard to imitate—but a work that does imitate an established writer’s voice immediately gets branded as derivative or mere pastiche or parody.

The singer’s voice makes a good analogy to writer’s voice. To start by saying what it’s not, I’m not talking about the easily discerned difference between Renee Fleming singing opera and Mariah Carey belting out a pop song. Opera and pop are different musical forms, just as a poem and a novel are different literary forms, and the singers or writers present each in an appropriate artistic style. Voice is more like this: you’re sitting in a greasy spoon in Wichita drinking coffee, and the radio is set to an oldies station. A phrase of vocal music floats past your ears, and you think, “Judy Garland!” or “Louis Armstrong!” Garland and Armstrong are both decades dead, but millions of people still recognize each of these great singers’ unique voice whenever they hear it.

When it’s in the first person, the reader may think of it as the character’s voice rather than the author’s. One of the great challenges to the writer is to shift voice when writing different characters. Some writers do it better than others. To use examples from mystery fiction, Charlaine Harris does it masterfully with the protagonists of her three series, Sookie Stackhouse, Lily Bard, and Harper Connolly. Ruth Rendell, after writing the Inspector Wexford books for years, took the pseudonym of Barbara Vine, in my opinion, less to write in a different subgenre than to write in a different voice. Robert Parker’s voice, on the other hand, is strong and unmistakable, but he doesn’t change it well, so that the Sunny Randall books sound—to my ear, at least—exactly like the Spenser books. Stuart Woods is similarly monolithic: the Holly Barker books sound exactly like the Stone Barrington books, a problem the author solved by getting his two protagonists together and into bed.

Voice at its best is both powerful and memorable. The three examples below came to mind immediately, although I haven’t reread any of these books in years. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in 1885. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published more than 70 years earlier, in 1813. Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle came out in 1948. Like Judy Garland and Louis Armstrong, Huck Finn and Elizabeth Bennett and Cassandra Mortmain are unforgettable once you’ve heard them speak.

Twain:
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Austen:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?"

Smith:
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring—I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided that my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.

The Mystery of Titles

Sandra Parshall


The new baby doesn’t have a name. Yet. I’m still thinking “it” and “the book” and sometimes “the albatross” when I should have a perfect name already typed onto the title page. Before too many more days have passed, I will place its fate in other hands, but it won’t leave me until it has a title.

The titles for The Heat of the Moon and Disturbing the Dead popped out of the text at me, screaming, “I’m the title, I’m the title!” The only screaming this time around has come from my end.

Part of the problem, of course, is that all the great titles have been snatched up by those greedy bestselling authors. A title can’t be copyrighted, but when it has graced a NY Times bestseller, it can’t be reused anytime soon, if ever. Otherwise, my new book might be called Tell No One.

For many mystery writers, titles don’t seem to be a major headache. If they write cozies that focus on cooking or crafts or some other specialized interest, titles are always drawn from those subjects. Puns abound, and they must be fun to come up with. Not too many dark suspense novels have funny puns for titles, though, so I won’t even look in that direction.

Should I go with something that screams THRILLER or SUSPENSE? The problem there is how to devise a title that won’t sound like everything else on the shelf and, possibly, lead to confusion with another book. Do a simple title check on Amazon and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of available books with titles containing Killer, Kill, Murder, Death, Blood, Dark/Darkness. Not all are crime novels, but a hefty percentage are.

Should I go literary? Everybody tells me The Heat of the Moon is a “literary” title, and some find fault with it because it doesn’t immediately bring to mind psychological suspense, which is what the book is. Yet they admit it is intriguing, and after reading the book they agree the title fits. A surprising number of crime novels do have so-called literary titles, and this makes no difference whatever to readers if the author is well-known. What James Lee Burke fan would pass over A Morning for Flamingos or A Stained White Radiance because they don’t have obvious mystery titles? (On the other hand, maybe In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead “sounds like a mystery” because it has dead in it.)

Poetry is usually a good source of titles, but so far my search through Eliot, Plath, Auden, Yeats, Roethke, Merwin and other favorites has turned up few possibilities – again, the best have already been used, often more than once. The Bible is also filled with the titles of other people’s books, and I have spent more than a little time lately cursing at holy scripture.

So I continue with the final tweaks as the day of decision approaches. I try to put aside frustration and trust that the book knows its name. One day soon, it will share that information with me.

Christmas Baking

Sharon Wildwind

I have a path I follow every morning, much like a letter carrier follows the same route. I visit a couple of mystery-related sites. Load the e-mails. Read the five mystery lists to which I subscribe. Read the personal e-mail, much of which revolves around mystery writing. Read what my husband sends to me under the heading of “cybernews,” tit-bits he picks up in his electronic travels that he thinks might interest, inform, or amuse me. On Sunday I look at what’s been published in Southern U.S. newspapers about writers and writing—got to keep up with my roots there—and at irregular intervals, I get electronic announcements, and newsletters about the mystery world.

In my little corner of the electronic mystery world, the gloves are off. The word I’ve seen most in the past four months is DON’T.

Don’t patronize me.
Don’t tell me my publisher isn’t as good as the next one.
Don’t send in your renewal to certain groups.
Don’t support conferences.
Don’t expect me to belong to a particular group any more.
Don’t expect cooperation from me.
Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up.

Who is shutting whom out, and why, and who said this, and who made that stupid decision, and who is in charge anyway is, right now, THE topic. Rather than repeat the multi-layered discussion—it is truly multilayered, often resembling water slipping over rocks—you can check the archives of any number of blogs and lists.

Please, please, please do not add to the miasma by bringing those discussion to this blog, in any guise, when response to this posting. There are other forums, and I truly believe we have another agenda here. I have two agendas this morning.

My first one is to talk some common sense about mystery conventions. It’s a quart-in-a-pint-pot situation.

Convention are organized and presented by volunteers, all of whom are authors, librarians, readers, or spouses gently convinced to help out. The people who make conventions happen do it because they love mysteries. None of them get paid, and all of them volunteer an incredible number of hours, not only on the convention week-end, but for the year before the event, and usually for six weeks after the event. Some of them keep coming back, year after year, for upwards of twenty years.

The average convention begins on a Friday evening and ends Sunday, some time between 1 PM and 5 PM. Allowing time for sleeping, meals, and bathroom breaks, that gives roughly 18 to 22 hours in which to schedule an opening ceremony, a social event, panels, readings, guest interviews, forensic demonstrations, and quite likely a charity auction, banquet, awards ceremony, and several writing workshops. Plus there is the hospitality suite—some of those run 24 hours a day—and making sure there is time for people to schmooze, grab a drink in the bar, visit the book sellers, etc.

A convention boils down to a limited container (18 to 22 hours crammed into one weekend) trying to hold ever-expanding contents (the exponential growth in the number of authors). Yes, we are at the breaking point. Yes, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “The center does not hold.” Yes, people are groping for possible solutions and some of them hurt.

Which bring up my second agenda. An anthropologist with whom I’ve studied cross-cultural issues likes to tell this story.

Two sisters were baking for Christmas. Both were using a recipe which called for a lemon, and there was only one lemon left in the house. The sisters fought over who had the right to it. Their mother, tired of the arguments, cut the lemon in half and gave one-half to each girl.

Both grumbled. It wasn’t what they wanted, but at least they gotten something. The older sister squeezed out the juice from her half, tossed the peel away, and made her cookies. The younger sister grated the peel, threw out the pulp, and made her cake.

The next couple of years could change the face of mysteries. It’s about time we stopped using the D--’- word, looked one another in the eye, and asked questions like, “What do you need?” and “How can we work together?”

The bottom line is: What can we do that’s creative and innovative and will keep mysteries alive for everyone?

-----
Writing quote for the week:
We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.~Maya Angelou, writer

Sugarman’s

Sharon Wildwind

Julia and I traded slots. She got mine last week, so I get hers this week. If you’re looking for Julia, come back next Monday.

I never know what I will pull out of the memory bag on Remembrance Day. Some memories are more pleasant than others. This year I got lucky. What came out was a San Antonio icon: Sugarman’s uniforms.

Most people, if they thought about it at all, would assume that the Army provided new nurses with uniforms.

Not true. The Army did issued us a duffle bag full of goodies: stiff white cotton work uniforms for Stateside hospital duty; green fatigues for Vietnam; 3 sets of woolen fatigues—keep in mind we were doing basic training in Texas, in August—just in case our orders were for Korea or Alaska instead of Vietnam, and two set of lightweight, green gabardine summer uniforms.

But we had to buy our Class A’s and dress uniforms, and that involved a rite of passage, spending the afternoon at Sugarman’s. It was more than a store, it was an institution. Common sense says it couldn’t have been in a basement, but memory tells me it felt like a basement. The place was piled with boxes. Shoe boxes. Glove boxes. Hat boxes. Racks of Army green, pure white, and black uniform jackets and skirts.

Army green for Class A’s, our ubiquitous officer’s uniform, the one that said, “I am Army.” Dazzling white dress uniforms for those nurses being assigned to a tropical country, and black dress uniforms for those of us who weren’t. White shirts with a little collar accent. White gloves for summer; black leather gloves for winter. Two hats—one green and one either white or black, depending on which dress uniform you were getting—both with a bit of gold braid and a heavy, gold-plated Army crest on it.

The shoes and the purses! Next to the white Army nurses’s hospital duty cap, which never sat well on anyone’s head, the uniform items we groaned over the most were the purses. The Class A purse was black leather, with a shoulder strap, a fold-over flap and a little gold clasp. It looked like something our grandmothers would carry. At least the dress purse, a clutch bag, was smaller and could be discretely hidden by putting our hand behind our back. The shoes? “Pumps, leather, black, 1” heel, exclusive of ornamentation,” Army-talk for plain.

The people at Sugarman’s were amazing. Every six weeks they clothed an entire basic class. You could see them eyeballing our measurements as we walked in the door. Pick a jacket and skirt off the racks, into the dressing rooms, then out came the tape measures. Zip. Sleeves to be this long. Zip. Skirts to be this long. Chalk whipped over the sleeve caps or down the sides to mark the alterations, then fill out a form, tuck it with your clothes, and “It will be ready for you next Tuesday.”

And then the line up for the accessories. “Hat size?” Two hats go into the bag. “Glove size?” Two pair of gloves into the bag. “Try on shoes over there.” A pair of shoes into the bag. If you didn’t know your hat or glove size, the tape measure came out again, this time around your head. “Is this the way you plan to wear your hear, dear? If you’re going to get a hair-cut tell me now.”

Finally, with our bags stuffed to bulging, we wrote checks. Three hundred and some odd dollars. Our price for being officers.

But, oh, when next Tuesday rolled around! Plastic bags full of brand new uniforms were delivered to our quarters. We put them on, we primped, we laughed, we groaned, and we stood a little taller, realizing that we were now real-live, honest-to-goodness U.S. Army officers.


Dress uniform, Graduation day, 1969, Fort Sam Houston, Texas

The Myth of the Untraceable Poison

Doug P. Lyle, MD (Guest blogger)

One of the most common questions I get from writers is: Is there a poison that can’t be found in a corpse? The answer is No. And Yes.

Much depends on the state of the corpse when it is found. If severely decayed or completely skeletonized, the medical examiner and the forensic toxicologist have their hands tied. Mostly. There are some toxins, such as the heavy metals (mercury, lead, and arsenic are common ones), that can be found in bones and hair. But most toxins can’t be found in corpses that are severely decayed or simply bones.

In a more or less intact body, your villain can still get away with the murder by poison. That is, until your clever sleuth figures out that something is amiss and solves the crime.

The first thing your murderer must consider is how to make the poisoning look like something else. An example would be an elderly person with heart and lung disease who dies in his sleep. In this case, the person's private physician would sign the death certificate as a natural cardiac death and almost always the M.E. will accept it. Why? Because there is an old adage in medicine that says: Common things occur commonly. Most people who die in this situation do indeed die from natural causes, so searching for something more sinister would be neither logical nor practical. If the M.E. accepted the private physician’s cause of death, no autopsy would be done and no toxicological examinations would be undertaken. An overdose of morphine or digitalis or arsenic or anything else would go undetected.

Unless someone asked questions. Maybe a high-dollar inheritance or insurance policy is in play. If an inheritance, one family member could suspect another and ask questions. In the case of a large insurance policy, the insurance company would look under every stone before paying off the policy. Or your sleuth could have some reason to suspect that things are not as they seem. In any of these situations, the ME might be moved to open a file and investigate.

But if your killer is clever, he might be able to keep the M.E. completely out of the picture or at least give him an easy answer for the cause of death. If no murder is suspected, he'll take the path of least resistance, which is also the cheapest route. Remember, he must live with and justify his budget annually. If he is wasteful he'll be looking for a job. So, give him a cheap and easy out. Your sleuth will then have to battle the M.E. to get the case re-opened.

The second thing a clever poisoner can do is to use a poison that is not readily detectable and will slip through most drug screens. Toxicology testing follows a two-tiered approach. Screening tests, which are easier, faster, and cheaper, are used to identify common classes of drugs such as narcotics or amphetamines. This only tells the M.E. and toxicologist that some type of narcotic or amphetamine is present, but not which one. Determining which one requires more sophisticated, time-consuming, and expensive confirmatory testing. And if the screening tests are normal, no further testing is warranted and the M.E. would not spend the time and money to go further down that road.

Drug screens typically test for alcohol, narcotics, sedatives, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and aspirin. Some screen for a few other classes. Once a member of a class is identified, then confirmatory testing will determine exactly which member of the class is present and in what amount. For example, if narcotic is found in the screen, further testing might show that the actual narcotic present is morphine. Or an amphetamine might be further analyzed and this might show that methamphetamine is the culprit.

Your poisoner could use a poison that would not be found in the typical screen. Things such as arsenic, selenium, and most plants (oleander, deadly nightshade, etc.) do not show up on the typical tox screen and when the screen came back negative, the M.E. might not go further. Why would he spend the time and money without a good reason? This is where your sleuth steps in to shake things up. But if a poison is suspected and if the funds and interest to pursue it are present, anything can be found in an intact corpse. Using gas chromatography in conjunction with either mass spectrometry (GS/MS) or infrared spectroscopy (GC/IR) will give a chemical fingerprint for any molecule. And since each molecule has its own structure and thus its own fingerprint, every compound can be distinguished from every other one.

To write a good mystery that will keep the reader guessing to the end, you must plot the nearly perfect murder. This way when your sleuth cracks the case, he or she will be a true hero. If poisoning is your killer’s chosen weapon, then use the above principles to make your plot as clever and convoluted as possible. Have your killer mask the death as natural or use some poison that is not readily detectable in screening tests and then your sleuth must be very clever to solve the case.

There are several sources for you to search out poisons and to discover how they act and how they are identified. Google, of course, and try plugging into your state poison control center. My books, Forensic for Dummies, Murder and Mayhem, and Forensics and Fiction cover a number of poisons. I also recommend Howdunnit: Book of Poisons by Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon from Writers’ Digest Books. It is a great resource for poisons of all types.

Visit the Writers Medical and Forensic Lab at http://www.dplylemd.com.

Research: Like Salt To Mashed Potatoes, Part 8

SNOOZE YOU LOSE
Or
Do I really want to write about this subject?

For my last post on the subject of RESEARCH I want us to consider what NOT to research. Some authors are tempted to write what’s popular, or what seems to be selling regardless of whether we read that genre or subject matter, like it, or even know anything about it. That’s a mistake on more than one level. What’s popular changes faster than our bed sheets, so by the time we get it written, revised, polished, and ready to send out to publishers or agents, it isn’t popular any more. Might even be very UN-popular. (I can’t tell you how many authors said they scrapped story lines involving New York City after 9/11.)

Second, if we don’t enjoy writing about a subject, our passion won’t come through, and readers will be nodding off by the end of chapter one. The advice to “write what you know” is given by seasoned authors for a reason. Besides that, if we don’t know the subject OR aren’t sure we’ll enjoy writing about it, we certainly won’t want to research it. Mathematics bores me silly, so no way would I attempt to write a book about a math teacher, CPA, or rocket scientist. I DO enjoy watching cop shows on television, researching investigative procedures on the Internet or in print, or taking classes, like a Basic Death Investigation (not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, but fascinating nonetheless.)

For my second series, my research is fairly easy. My hubby is restoring a ’57 Chevy and we belong to an antique car club so I can get all the answers I need for that one. And I enjoy researching it.

Ask yourself: what are my interests? Canoeing, knitting, sword fighting, playing jacks, hang gliding? What do I most like to read about? What subject would I most likely take if I were going to college or beginning a new career?

We shouldn’t shoot ourselves in the writing hand by choosing a subject we aren’t the least bit interested in. But remember, there is really no excuse for sloppy writing or researching these days with so much information available from so many different sources. All we have to do is dig.

SUGGESTION: Make a list of at least five subjects you aren’t expert on but would enjoy learning more about. And writing about. Make a list of five subjects that bore you silly, that you wouldn’t consider reading about much less writing about. Print the lists out and put them in your research folder. Choose one of the items you enjoyed researching during this class and get to work on it. Short story, article, full novel, whatever you feel up to. If you need more inspiration and you found pictures while researching, post them on your storyboard. And have fun.

What’s a story board? It’s a great place to tack pictures of the areas we’re writing about, research articles that inspired us, and index cards with chapter numbers and a sentence or two about each chapter, to let us see where we are in the story line and how it flows. Story boards can be cork bulletin boards, or those neat fold-up poster boards that salesmen carry around, or in my case, an antique metal board that came from the office of a molasses company. I use magnets and clips to keep inspiration nearby.





Okey dokey, that's the last of my postings on research. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments area. Or contact me privately. Hope you enjoyed it. For me research is a lot of fun. And sometimes you get to shoot at things or blow them up.

Running Alongside the Marathon

Elizabeth Zelvin

Last Sunday I watched on TV as Martin Lel of Kenya won the New York Marathon in 2 hours, 9 minutes, and 4 seconds. Then I tied on my battered sneakers, trotted out the door, and jogged down the block and into Central Park to join the race.

Actually, I finance the New York Marathon. Among the major sponsors for many years has been the Rudin Family. The Rudins are my landlord. I've been paying rent to them for forty years. They bestow it on the Marathon, take a tax loss (or so I assume), and get their picture in the paper as public benefactors. But it's my money.

Heading east across the park, I join the runners at the 24 mile marker, not far from the Metropolitan Museum. The marathoners use the road that loops around the park, roped off today, but the pedestrian path that runs alongside it, circuitously parallel, is navigable. By the time I get there, the course is packed with runners: men who have been running for three hours and will finish creditably in less than four, if my math is correct, and women who started half an hour earlier than the men. The excitement is infectious. The sidelines are packed with spectators holding homemade signs and banners. Pride, delight, and awe suffuse their faces as the runners stream by. Some groups wear matching T shirts proclaiming them the "scream team" or "posse" of their friend or family member in the race. They hoot, holler, and cheer for those they know and those they don't alike.

The crowd, both runners and those who cheer them on, is as diverse as ever in New York —and especially fun to see when it's a party, as this is. Every face is smiling. Every ethnic group and nation is represented. The signs and banners blazon encouragement to Bub and Mia and Yan and Kimi. I pick out a skinny guy in red from the river of runners and pick up my pace, trying to keep up with him, just to see if I can. I'm fresh—I haven't just run 24 ½ miles—so I manage it for 50 feet before I let him forge ahead and go back to my usual slow jog.

It's beautiful in Central Park, in spite of the gray sky and a temperature only in the 50s. It doesn't feel cold at all. The air is soft. Grass and weeping willows are still green in this unseasonably warm fall. Some of the lindens have a faint dusting of gold. A maple here and there offers shades of apricot and lemon. To my right as I pass the 25 mile marker, the Wollman Rink, where I learned to skate more than half a century ago, flashes a glimpse of gleaming polar white as a maintenance vehicle lumbers over the bright surface, smoothing the ice. The excitement swells as we near the south end of the park.

What elicits this desire to cheer for total strangers? Why do I have tears in my eyes? The sight of so many people each bent on achieving a personal best? The communal experience of this great city at play? Maybe it's partly that something as simple as running, accessible to all, can be raised to such a high art, such a unifying global moment. Sure, the Marathon, like any sports event, has its economic base and motivation. The winner gets $130,000, which the commentators I heard thought Lel would probably invest in his home town in Kenya, as he has past wins. But money's not what it's about. Not to the people who have turned out for it.

As I reluctantly turn west, then north, and head toward home, the mid-range finishers are beginning to pour out of the park to rendezvous with their friends and families, find someplace to rest their legs, maybe have a celebratory pizza and a beer. Each wears a medallion on a ribbon around his or her neck. They all look tired and very happy. As I cross Central Park West, two guys wrapped in mylar exchange a complicit grin with a guy wrapped in a red fleece blanket crossing the other way. They've done it!

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?

Mystery Writer Karen Olson Fields Queries About Reporters, Dunkin Munchkins and Billy Joel

posted by Julia Buckley
Karen Olson's new book, DEAD OF THE DAY, comes out today from Penguin. You can find the Amazon link here. Poe's Deadly Daughters are helping Karen start off her blog tour, and we're happy to welcome her here.


Karen, I just finished your book, DEAD OF THE DAY, and I enjoyed it very much.

I’m curious about the title. I know that “Dead of the day” is a newspaper term referring to the people who are listed as the day’s obituaries, but I’m also wondering if you wanted an inversion of the Hispanic notion of “Day of the Dead,” or El Dia de Los Muertos, since many of your characters are Latino.

I’m glad you enjoyed it!

“Dead of the day” is not a real newspaper term. And I hadn’t thought much about the Latino link in the book to the Day of the Dead. This was not the original working title of the book, which was “Waterlogged.” The publisher didn’t like it and had me change it, and it took some time to come up with a new title. My good friend Reed Coleman asked me how the book starts, and I told him and used the term. He said, “You do know that’s your title?” He was right.

I need to know this immediately: your character, Annie Seymour, at one point is eating Dunkin Munchkins, and says that she avoids the jelly filled because she knows how they get the jelly in there. Hey! I eat those. How DO they get the jelly in there?

I don’t know. But I heard someone say that once, so I thought it would be a fun line. But I didn’t really want to know, so I never looked into it. This is pretty much the way I research a book. :)

Me, too. Annie is in a little love triangle, in that she can’t quite decide between two good, attractive men. Do people ever liken you to Janet Evanovich for this reason?

My books have been compared to Janet Evanovich’s, but I’m not sure if it’s Annie’s smart-alecky comments or the love triangle. Maybe a little bit of both. But I promise I will not keep readers eternally wondering about which man Annie will end up with.

The book makes me feel very old and sedentary, because when Annie isn’t tooling around in a vehicle she seems to be running all over the place, and at all hours of the day and night. Is this how it is in the world of reporting?

Being a reporter is being out on the streets, at city hall, at the police department, at crime scenes, at government meetings. Time is spent in the newsroom mainly to make calls and file stories.

You were a journalist for 20 years. How much of the craziness of Annie’s office was similar to yours?

I have tried very hard to keep the authenticity of what it’s like working in a real newsroom in my books. Many times I’ll read a novel with a reporter character and shake my head, wondering whether the author has ever been in a newsroom. Of course, I was never held at gunpoint, I was never taken hostage, and I don’t know any reporters who were. I did once work with a sports editor who kept a gun in his car’s glove box. And at the same paper, one of the reporters told a story about how he’d been stabbed — by his girlfriend — with a kitchen knife.

Wow. Do you miss chasing down stories?

I haven’t chased down a story in years. I was a reporter for six years and I covered small towns, everything from planning and zoning to school boards to town hall and land records. There’s a fair amount of chasing in that, but I found out I could make more money as a nighttime metro editor and copy editor. So I spent 15 years telling reporters where to go. Literally. While I sat at my desk and fixed their sentences and designed pages.

Good for you! I love your new website, although I miss the photo of you in front of the cool brownstone. Did you create the site yourself?

My friend Mike Jones, who used to work at the New Haven Register with me, owns a company called Webkazoo (www.webkazoo.com) and he designed my site with the help of his graphic artist wife Barbara Kagan. He also maintains it.

I must also note that your characters says something about going to a Billy Joel concert “back when people admitted they went to Billy Joel concerts.” Have I missed something? Am I uncool because I still like Billy Joel?

I think Billy Joel probably still draws people “of a certain age,” but he’s not as cool as he used to be. Although I still know all the words to all the songs on THE STRANGER album (but that dates me, too, since I still call them albums and not CDs).

Well, I think we're in the same club, Karen. Are you now working on a fourth Annie Seymour mystery?

The fourth Annie Seymour mystery is called SHOT GIRL. I’ve done all the edits on it and am waiting for the copy editor to finish with it, and I’ll get another chance to go through it.

The cover of your book is neat, and sort of retro. Do you like it?




















I love the cover. When I moved from Warner to Penguin, my editor said they wanted to change my “look.” While I really liked the bright colors and big font of the previous two covers, I think this one really hits the mark on showing the reader that it’s a mystery, it’s suspenseful, and there’s lots of action.

Now that you have a different job, do you get any extra time to read? If so, what’s the best book you’ve read lately?

I do read. I take the bus to work every day and have half an hour there and back of uninterrupted reading time. I just finished Lori Armstrong’s SHALLOW GRAVE, which is the third in her Julie Collins series, and is fantastic. I also have recently read Da Chen’s BROTHERS, which is an amazing tale of two brothers during and after the Cultural Revolution in China.

How are you and the family celebrating the publication of your book?

We don’t really celebrate, except maybe my husband will make something special for dinner. I don’t like a lot of fanfare; I just move onto the next project.

Did the First Offenders, your fellow bloggers, throw you a party? :)

It would be difficult for my fellow First Offenders to have a party for me since I’m in New Haven, Jeff Shelby’s in Dallas, Lori Armstrong’s in South Dakota, and Alison Gaylin is in upstate New York. And anyway, since Lori and Alison both have new books out now, too, it would have to be a party for all of us. We’re hoping to meet up at Left Coast Crime in Denver in March. It will be the first time we’ll all be in the same place since Bouchercon in Madison, Wisconsin, last year.

I was at that Bouchercon! Too bad we didn't meet. What’s next for Karen Olson?
I just keep moving forward. I’m working on a proposal for a fifth Annie book and I’m also working on one of those ubiquitous standalones we keep hearing about. It’s a crime novel, although very different from the series in that it’s written from multiple points of view and has a historical base although set in present day.

Sounds terrific--good luck with it. Thanks for chatting with me, Karen!

Thanks so much for having me here!