Meeting the Monsters

by Julia Buckley
We all like a good monster, don't we? Look at the famed monsters of Greek mythology, like the Hydra or Cerberus or the Gorgons. Characters in Greek lore feared them, but we all love to reference them because they are interesting and, thank goodness, not real.

The same is true of some famous literary monsters--Frankenstein or Dracula or King Kong or even Mr. Hyde. We learn lessons from their existence, and we are often ashamed of the way these monsters are treated by humanity.

But what about real monsters--monsters that truly live and have the power to destroy? TIME Magazine has isolated ten modern-day "monsters" from which we should definitely keep our distance. Why? In some cases, because they can kill us without much effort at all, and in others, like the traditional literary monsters, they are frightening and unusual to behold.

For example, the GIANT CROCODILE who makes number one on TIME's list. This Phillipines bad boy was 21 feet long and weighed 2,370 pounds. Local legend had it that the croc had consumed a child and at least one fisherman.

And who would want to swim into the realm of THE GIANT SQUID, which has never been captured alive and can weigh up to a TON?

Spider-haters, beware: The GOLIATH BIRD-EATING TARANTULA can be almost a foot in diameter. Ugh.

The PORTUGESE MAN-OF-WAR is a disturbing addition to the list, since it is not exactly an animal, but "is actually a "colonial organism" made of multiple polyps, the largest, a bladder filled with gas that is similar to the atmosphere, is often mistaken for a jellyfish."

TIME claims that the EMPEROR SCORPION, which can grow up to eight inches long, is actually a peaceful monster which could be kept as a pet. No thanks--check out the picture.

VAMPIRE BATS aren't all that literature has suggested they are--sometimes they are even good, and doctors are studying them as a weapon for treating strokes. But they are also, according to the magazine, sneaky and messy, and potential breeders of disease.

BIG FISH are often mistaken for sea serpents because they can grow to over 50 feet in length!

The poison of the BOX JELLYFISH is among the most toxic in the world.

The BURMESE PYTHON can weigh up to 1000 pounds, and that's a lot of snake to squeeze around a poor hapless victim!

Finally, TIME lists the ol' Loch Ness monster as a potentially living creature that no one has ever captured except in blurry photographs.

Looking at real so-called "monsters" makes it clear why legends have risen over the ages. Sometimes nature provides us with some scary, inexplicable creatures, and it's never clear which of them is potentially deadly.

Why does getting it right matter?

by Leslie Budewitz

As I venture out with a book aimed at helping fiction writers get the details about the legal world right, I find myself asking why getting it right matters. Actually, I hear other writers asking that. “It’s fiction,” they say. “Why does it matter whether I’ve called the crime first-degree murder instead of deliberate homicide, put a silencer on a revolver, or allowed the county sheriff to investigate a murder on an Indian reservation where the feds have felony jurisdiction?”

Because as writers, we build our fictional worlds one detail at a time. If we get one wrong–whether it’s foundation or frosting–our readers’ ability to live in that world for a few hours crumbles. 

You know what I’m talking about: On page ten, the protagonist describes a hospital as built of cinder block. You were born in that hospital, been a patient and a visitor, and you know there’s no cinder block to be seen. Your forehead wrinkles. When he leaves and gets in the same model car you drive, in a color it didn’t come in, you squint and tilt your head.

The author’s losing you. Your knowledge of the details breaks the fragile hold “the fictive dream,” in John Gardner’s phrase, has on you. You may stick with the book if the characters, premise, and writing satisfy you, but if any of those is problematic, you may move on. And a really serious error may nag at you long afterwards.

The problem is that while the devil may be in the details, so is the magic. A character comes alive by the details used to portray her actions, thoughts, and feelings. The trick, I think, is plausibility. Make the setting and the character action feel real. Like it could have happened that way. Use enough of the right details accurately that the reader trusts you. 

Do different stories require a different level of accuracy? There’s a good argument that the greater the suspension of disbelief required by the story, the less the details matter. If the protagonist of your cozy mystery is a caterer, your readers may care more that you proofed the recipes than whether you accurately described the fingerprinting process. Unless your trusty–and trusting–reader devours cozies on the bus on the way home from her job in the crime lab. Your mistake may mean she chooses another author for tomorrow’s commute.

But the flip side of that argument may be equally valid: the further your story lies from daily reality, the more the details matter. Consider science fiction and fantasy, where the worldly details are essential. If you accurately describe something the reader knows well–say, the effects of gravity–she’s more likely to believe your description of the mental powers one acquires stepping through the auric atmosphere of Genicia, third planet in the solar system Sapphire. When she closes the book, she knows–logically–that Sapphire and Genicia don’t exist. But if they did, this is what they would be like.

It isn’t only readers who care about the details. Agents and editors on a panel at Killer Nashville were asked what made them stop reading a submission. Errors in facts and character behavior scored high. (See the full list at http://carolynmulford.com/uncategorized/why-agents-and-editors-stop-reading .) Mistakes may matter more in the early chapters, when you’re still trying to set the hook. Once the reader–or agent or editor–is engaged in the story, she’s likely to be more forgiving–or to believe you, if she’s uncertain about a detail.

Still, you can kill yourself–and your story– trying to get everything right. What should you check and what can you let go?

- Check out facts related to major plot elements. If your villain intends to kill his wife with an overdose of insulin, make sure you know it can be done–and how.

- Focus on the dog, not the fleas. Don’t worry about whether a captain or a lieutenant would take charge of the investigation. But make sure you get the basic procedures right.

- Verify widely known facts outside your experience. If you’ve never been on a jury, talk with your neighbor who has. What surprised or upset her about the process? What were courthouse security measures? Was she bored or intrigued? Where did she park? Did the bailiff bring donuts?

- Don’t risk a mistake in things easily confirmed. If you’ve never seen a purple Subaru, chances are they weren’t made.

- We often make mistakes in the things we think we know. If it matters to the story, check it out–or leave it out.

- Historicals attract readers who love history. And some readers love to tell writers where they goofed. Does that mean you can’t write about 14^th century England because you weren’t born until 1970, or that you need an MA in the period? No. You need reliable references and an eye for the details that set the scene and bring the characters to life.

- Read through your ms. with your reader’s hat on. What might the typical reader question? Ask your critique partners to note anything that creases their brows.

- Accept that you’ll make mistakes. Don’t let that fear paralyze you.

So, when it comes to facts in fiction, where do you draw the line, as a writer–or as a reader? 

Leslie Budewitz is the author of Books, Crooks and Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure (Quill Driver Books), to be released October 1. Her short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, The Whitefish Review, and elsewhere. For an excerpt, articles for writers, and information on her research services, visit her at www.lawandfiction.com.

Scrabble

by Sheila Connolly

I woke up the other morning with a word ringing in my head. It came at the end of a half-waking dream, in which a long table was surrounded by people who stood up and proclaimed as one, "Jid!"



The problem is, it's not a word, at least not one I've ever heard. But on the off chance that my subconscious was trying to tell me something, or I was channeling a higher power, I went online hunting. So far no definitions, but a lot of acronyms:


Jabber IDentifier

Janes Intelligence Digest (military/government)

Job Instruction Document (computing)

Joint Intelligence Directorate

Joint Interoperability Division

Journal of Infectious Diseases

Journal of Intellectual Disabilities

Journal of Investigative Dermatology

Junta Interamericana de Defensa


I don't know of any reason why any of these should be floating around in my head. Personally I hope that I was thinking of the Joint Intelligence Directorate rather than the Journal of Intellectual Disabilities.


In addition, Webster's Online Dictionary kindly provided me with two non-English uses:


In Lebanese, jid means grandfather

In Nauruan, jid means to throw, sling, skid, hurl or pitch. (In case you aren't familiar with Nauru, it's an island country in Micronesia in the South Pacific—I had to look it up). I have no Lebanese or Nauruan relatives.


So why am I making up nonsense words in my dreams? I blame Scrabble.


In case you didn't notice, New England had a visitor named Irene last week, and as a result, many homes, including ours, lost power for varying lengths of time. It's depressing to realize how much our daily lives have been taken over by electronic entertainment. I can't tell you the number of times I reached for the remote control to turn on a television, if only to get updates on the crummy weather and the destruction it was wreaking, only to realize that there was nothing there. My husband was out of town, in a drier state, leaving my daughter and me to entertain each other in the dark. We chose Scrabble, by candlelight.

My daughter was a comparative literature major in college, and I'm a writer. So why were we coming up with scintillating words like "poop"? It's all in the luck of the draw. At one point I had four "n's" and three "I's" which does not make for good (i.e., high scoring) words, or any words at all, for that matter. We played two games in the dark (which presents particular challenges, since you can't see your tiles half the time), and she beat me both times, but by only a few points.


But what was interesting about playing with my daughter was not the words we did come up with, but the words we invented along the way (we stuck to the rules--honest). There were a few discussions about when a foreign word became accepted and commonly used in English, and the same for slang terms. We're both mildly competitive, and we both love language, so sometimes it actually hurt when we inserted only a couple of letters to make fabulous words like "be" or "if" when that would yield the highest score. We wanted more flair, more complexity. We were prepared to create interesting new words and defend them with convincing definitions.


Hence, jid. What do you think a jid is? Animal, vegetable or mineral? Historic or modern?


And can I use it in a Scrabble game?

Short & Simple: A Quickie Lesson on Short Stories

Steve Liskow (Guest Blogger)

If you have children, you know that everything you thought you knew about parenting goes out the window when the next baby comes along. It’s the same way with short stories.
Every time I write one, it’s like reinventing the wheel. I’ve come to believe there is only one hard and fast rule about writing short stories, and here it is:

Don’t worry about getting anything right the first time—plot, characters, setting, word count—because you will revise everything over and over before it’s right. When you think it’s finished, put it away for a month, then print it and read it out loud. You’ll hear things you love, but you’ll hear lots of details and ideas you can make sharper.

Everything else is open for discussion.

Short stories are an exercise in how much you can leave out, which means that you have to remember the essentials.

CHARACTER: somebody wants something.

CONFLICT: someone or something is preventing her from getting it. Make it basic so you don’t have to explain anything. Back story kills more short stories than a dangling participle.
Change can generate conflict: a new home, a new job, a new school, a divorce. Murder shakes up the status quo really well.

STAKES: the audience must believe it matters to the character, even if they don’t agree with her. The big issues that you can’t take back are love, death, safety/security (family, job, etc), and social approval.

I try to limit myself to no more than four scenes and no more than four named characters.

A SCENE takes place in one location in continuous time, during which one person attempts to achieve his goal and meets resistance. During that scene, something has to change for a character, the reader, or both. If it’s a character, make the change something external.

A scene only has four possible endings: Yes, the character gets what she wants; No, she doesn’t get it (these work best as endings): Yes, BUT, which adds a complication; and No, and furthermore…

The third is the stuff of fairy tales and myths because the protagonist has to pay a price.

The fourth makes things even worse and increases the stakes and tension. It works better in suspense novels because you may not have time to explore it in a short story. To increase tension, try using a short time span. Only one of my published stories covers more than two hours.

Make your setting basic so the reader doesn’t need description. Most people can visualize a kitchen, office, or miniature golf course, so just include the details that move the plot.

It may seem paradoxical, but this is a good time to talk about ENDINGS. Most endings go on too long. When you’ve set up your resolution, stop. Find a good punch line and trust your reader to get it.

You set up the ending with your opening, but it should still be a surprise. If the reader sees it coming, he’ll stop reading. It’s like trying to tell a joke everyone has heard before.

The ending should feel inevitable, even though people shouldn’t see it coming until they get there. Sometimes, your best bet is to write the story with two possible endings. Pick the more satisfying (and surprising) one, then go back and change the early parts. Remember what I said about revision?

Openings are tough because they should do several things. They establish how the story is being told (POV, tone, and style), introduce the main characters, set up the conflict (which also begins to set up the ending), and hook the reader’s attention. That sounds hard, but it’s very general. In a mystery, all you do us suggest that there will be a solution. Cut yourself some slack and remember (again), you’re going to rewrite this thing many times. Everything will get sharper and clearer, but it takes awhile.

People often stress the opening sentence, but that can be a trap. If it doesn’t fit smoothly into the rest of the story, it can become a gimmick and the reader may feel manipulated. Try to hook the reader with your first paragraph, or even your first page.

Start when the conflict is big and crucial. Don’t try to lead up to it. If conflict isn’t present, start by introducing the element that will cause it. Opening near the confrontation means your stakes are already high and you can eliminate all the background explanation that saps a story’s energy.

If you need more time or more explanation, maybe it isn’t a short story after all.

Oh, I forgot. There’s one more rule: Above all, have fun. You won’t make a lot of money in this racket, so enjoy yourself.


Steve Liskow served on a short story panel with Charlaine Harris at last year’s Crime Bake. His upcoming titles include “Sweet Hitch-hiker” in Dead Calm (Level Best Books) this fall, “Hot Sugar Blues” in Vengeance, an MWA anthology edited by Lee Child due next spring, and The Whammer Jammers, his indie thriller about roller derby, coming soon.

Tell me your pet stories!

By Sandra Parshall

Tell me your pet stories today and you’ll have a chance to win a hardcover copy of my new book, Under the Dog Star – plus the right to name an animal in a future novel.

Under the Dog Star is a mystery, first and foremost, but it’s also about veterinarian Rachel Goddard’s determination to rescue abandoned and mistreated dogs and give them the better life they deserve. Rachel doesn’t resemble her creator in many ways, but she gets her passion for protecting animals directly from me. I’ve spent many years of my life with wonderful, loving pets that other people didn’t want or wouldn’t care for properly.

On two different occasions when I was much younger, I swiped kittens from people who were neglecting them so seriously that I feared for their lives. I kept one. I gave the other – a tiny ball of white fur that was forced to sleep outside, regardless of the weather – to a friend’s mother, who named her Mary and loved her dearly for the rest of her pampered life. (Mary’s story, slightly altered, is mentioned in my book Broken Places.)

My husband and I have had several cats that came to us because their original owners didn’t want them. Sam, a beautiful blond tabby, was a neighborhood cat who visited me when I worked in my garden. I never knew who he belonged to. Then came a day when he wouldn’t leave and was obviously hungry. We couldn’t locate his owners, and we concluded they had moved and left him behind. Sammy became ours, and we cherished him.

Frank was immediately recognizable as a stray or abandoned cat. Despite prodigious hunting skills, he was so thin I could see the outlines of his ribs, and he had bald patches in his dull coat. One ear had been almost completely torn off, probably in a fight with another roaming cat. Frank had once had a home – he wore an old flea collar – but he’d been on his own for a long time and might not survive another winter. I began feeding him. He wanted the food but was so wary of people that it took a couple of months to persuade him to let me touch him lightly and briefly. After trust was established, Frank became our cat. I cut off that old flea collar, we had him neutered, he put on weight and his blotchy black and white fur grew thick and shiny. He was never a beauty, but his joy in belonging somewhere at last gave him a proud demeanor that would charm anyone. Frank died many years ago, but he lives on as Rachel’s one-eared, squawky-voiced cat in my books.

Simon

We acquired our wonderful Simon when the young woman who had him discovered that her live-in boyfriend couldn’t stand the noise and demands of a lonely, frightened kitten who had just been separated from his mother and litter mates. He weighed about two pounds at the time, but he took charge of us immediately, letting us know he intended to sleep on our bed, not in a cat bed on the floor. Simon and I had the same birthday, and of all our cats he was my truest soul mate. We lost him on 2006, when he was almost 18.

Simon had grown up with Nicholas, our first Abyssinian, and when Nicky died we wanted to bring kittens into the house to help Simon – and us – endure the loss. We wanted another Aby, but we also wanted to give a home to a kitten that desperately needed one. Before Gabriel, a ruddy Abyssinian like Nicky, was old enough for us to take him from the breeder’s home, we found Emma through the Feline Foundation of Greater Washington. 

Emma

Emma had been abandoned as a tiny kitten at a truck stop in West Virginia. It was pure luck that the son of a man who does cat rescues happened to spot her running around, terrified, under the wheels of the enormous trucks. He snatched her up and delivered her to his father, who kept her long enough to make sure she was healthy, then drove her all the way to Northern Virginia, where she would have a better chance of finding a home. Emma is 10 years old now, still bossing Gabriel around, still pretty much running our household.

Have you adopted a homeless dog or cat? Tell me your story and you’ll have a chance to win a free copy of Under the Dog Star and name an animal in a future book. 
*******************
Find and support a no-kill animal shelter in your area. http://www.nokillnetwork.org/

Dragons of the World, Unite

Sharon Wildwind


As she does every year, Zorina, the labor negotiator for our stuffed animal collection, delivered her Labor Day speech yesterday morning. A hootenanny of songs like Joe Hill, Bread and Roses, and my personal favorite, Working Man followed.

Lunch of stew, brown bread, and strong root beer (our temperance bunnies vetoed ale) concluded this year’s celebration.

As writers we spend a lot of time worrying about and working with people at both ends of the book chain. At the front end are research librarians, agents and editors; at the back end, advertising departments, book sellers, and library purchasers.

In between that spark of an idea that sends us scooting off to the library, and seeing our books in book shop windows and on library shelves, there are one heck of a lot of people to whom we don’t give much thought. And maybe we should.

Yes, there are eleventy-one electronic book versions out there — which you either love or hate — but today’s blog is about something else, the physicality of printed books. Ink shaped into little letters and absorbed by paper. Covers. Glue. Warehouse shelves. Fork lifts and pallets. Eighteen-wheelers. All of those textures and smells that people are talking about when they say that they love to hold books, smell them, fold corners down to bookmark their places, arrange them on shelves, or leave them in unstable, near-toppling piles beside their bed.

All of that physicality comes from raw materials, things that have to be cut down or mix up, transported, hoisted, assembled, stored, and transported again. All of that work is done by people who work with their bodies as well as their heads. People who labor, in the old sense of the word.

There isn’t a worker on my list that isn’t controversial. Considering the carbon footprint or the social justice footprint of even one book is enough to make you furious or want to lie down in a dark room. What I’d like to do today is thank those people who made my book possible.

Loggers made my book. So did paper mill workers and people who knew how to concoct inks and glues.

Typesetters and printers made my book. For a lot of my life, that typesetter had to work with cast hot-metal, in a room full of noisy Linotype machines. If you ever have the opportunity, watch the documentary Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu, by David Loeb Weiss and Carl Schlesinger. It chronicles the last day — July 2, 1978 — that the New York Times was typeset, composed, and printed in hot-metal type and the next day, the first day that computers took over those tasks. It’s a fascinating look at just how complicated it is to shape little letters, cover them with ink, and get paper to absorb that ink.

Warehouse employees packed books into boxes and boxes onto pallets, which were loaded on to eighteen-wheelers for truck drivers to drive across the country, and stevedores and merchant marines to transport around the world.

I’m raising a glass of root beer to all of you. Thanks, guys and gals. Well done.
________
Quote for the week:

You are never strong enough that you don't need help.
~César Estrada Chávez (1927 – 1993), farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

Discover Joan Aiken!

by Julia Buckley
September 4 marked what would have been the 87th birthday of the wonderful Joan Aiken. Never heard of her, you say? Then you must check out this amazing website which highlights the more than 100 books Ms. Aiken composed in her lifetime, out of what seemed an endless well of creativity.

Aiken was never tied to one genre. Click on "books" on her homepage to see all of the avenues she travelled when in quest of a great story. One of my favorites is listed under "Wolves Chronicles" (see the picture with the wolf outside the castle). These great tales started with the lovely, Gothic, young adult tale called THE WOLVES OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE, which not only wins my award for greatest title, but which kept me spellbound as a youngster.

Aiken came from a highly creative family. The daughter of poet Conrad Aiken and the sister of Jane Aiken Hodge (another favorite from my youth), she never had university training, but began telling (and selling) her stories right out of school.

Aiken won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1972, but she also won a Guardian Award (for Children's Literature), and in 1999 she was awarded an MBE for "her services to children's literature" (Wikipedia).

Perhaps I love her partly because she was so much a part of my own childhood; but Aiken's work has truly stood the test of time. Jane Austen fans should check out Aiken's works about that writer (click on the bust of Jane), and those who love fantasy should click on the unicorn--Aiken was writing tales of imaginary worlds long before JK Rowling was even born.

Do yourself a favor and read a book by Joan Aiken today! Her website alone is a delightful adventure.

Author Denise Hamilton Interviewed

I am very pleased to welcome author Denise Hamilton to Poe’s Deadly Daughters today. Denise’s crime novels have been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Willa Cather awards. She also edited Los Angeles Noir and Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, which spent two months on bestseller lists, won the Edgar Award for “Best Short Story” and the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ award for “Best Mystery of the Year.”

Denise’s new novel, Damage Control, will be published by Scribner on September 6. She has five books in the Eve Diamond series and a standalone book The Last Embrace, set in 1949 Hollywood.

Prior to writing novels, Denise was a Los Angeles Times staff writer. Her award-winning stories have also appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel and New Times. She covered the collapse of Communism and was a Fulbright Scholar in Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War. Hamilton lives in the Los Angeles suburbs with her husband and two boys.

She also writes a perfume column, Uncommon Scents, for the Los Angeles Times. www.losangelestimesmagazine.com/uncommon-scents/

PDD: Your new novel Damage Control deals with a politician caught up in a sex and murder scandal. Did you rip that idea from the headlines?

Hamilton: LOL. If there’s one thing I learned while researching this book, it’s that politicians and sex scandals go together like bread and butter. They are always with us! Adding murder to the mix is rarer in real life – thank goodness, but it does happen. Consider the Chandra Levy murder. She was a government intern who was carrying on a secret affair with a married Congressman named Gary Condit. When Levy’s body was discovered in a wooded park, there was much speculation about whether Condit had killed her, perhaps to keep her from going public with the affair. But in the end another man was charged with her murder. But in the meantime, the revelations about their affair destroyed Condit’s career and much of his life.

So when I was writing Damage Control, I realized that a powerful, married politician would have ample motive to kill (or order the murder of) his young mistress if she threatened to go public with an affair. And that was the genesis of Damage Control. The question is, did he do it? And can Maggie Silver, the young woman hired to run damage control on the scandal, believe what the Senator tells her? And just to make things more interesting, U.S. Senator Henry Paxton is the father of Maggie’s BFF from high school. The girls have long been estranged, but Maggie used to worship the sophisticated, cosmopolitan Paxton family. They taught her a lot about art, culture, self-esteem. And now this father figure from her youth is embroiled in a nasty sex scandal, and life is about to get very complicated for our Maggie.

PDD: You call this book “surf noir.” Explain.

Hamitlon: As an L.A. native, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the beach. Rats nest in the fronds of those swaying palm trees. Used hypodermic needles lurk in the sugar white sands. Sharks patrol the coastal waters. Our Golden Coast is very noir to me. But at the same time, I spent much of my childhood summers at the beach, and went to plenty of beach parties in high school, college and beyond. The pull of the surf and the salt air and the drop-dead gorgeous natural beauty is quite strong. You’d frolic on the beach all day long, then shower and put on flowing dresses and perfume and leather sandals and have barbeques and drink daquiris. It was so hedonistic and elemental. And you’d always go with your girlfriends, and there would be the lots of cute boys, and everyone was tanned and glowing and it seemed a world of infinite possibility but also lurking shadows. So in Damage Control, there are two girls – Annabelle and Maggie – and they have this crazy intense relationship, the kind you can only have in adolescence when everything is so new and raw and filled with meaning. They wear each others’ clothes and eat the same things and listen to Tori Amos obsessively and do their homework together and spend every weekend at Annabelle’s big house overlooking the Pacific, scoping out the beach parties. And then one night something unspeakably awful happens at one of those parties that will haunt their lives forever.

Fifteen years later, Maggie, now an ambitious young PR executive, walks into her firm’s conference room and sees Annabelle’s Dad standing there. Welcome to your new client, Maggie. And welcome back to the nightmare you thought you’d safely tucked away forever. Because re-connecting with the Paxton family is going to bring everything back out into the open.

PDD: Maggie’s not a lone wolf like your series character Eve Diamond. How do they differ?

Hamilton: Well, you’re right, Eve is gritty and glamorous and a bit of a smart-ass and as a reporter, she’s skeptical of everyone and everything. With Maggie Silver, I wanted to do something different. So she’s a few years older, and she’s divorced, and she owns her own home – a little bungalow in the hilly Cypress Park neighborhood northeast of Los Angeles. But the biggest difference is that Maggie’s mother lives with her. She’s a cancer survivor, and she and Maggie have a very complicated relationship. This allowed me to tell crucial parts of the story via scenes between mother and daughter and to give Maggie a sounding board when she comes home from work.

Also, unlike Eve, I wanted Maggie to have family and close emotional ties. It raises the stakes in this novel. And it also creates a lot of conflict. If you were 33 and single, would you want live with your widowed mother? Especially if she was bossy and was always trying to set you up with any available men? And if you’d nursed her through cancer, only to find that she’d started smoking again? You would love your mother, sure, but you might also be resentful, angry, annoyed. Writing those scenes was very emotional for me, because I had to feel everything that Maggie did. But I also thought it made the book very real. Many of us are dealing with aging parents these days. There are financial, housing and psychological issues at play. There can be the feeling that the child must now assume the role of the parent. I wanted to deal with all those topics, but deftly, within the context of a political thriller.

PDD: Sounds Freudian. Anything drawn from real life with your own mother?

Hamilton: Some of the emotions - sure. But the plot is pure fiction. My mother passed away earlier this year at age 90 after suffering a debilitating stroke 10 years earlier. So yes, there was rage, incomprehension, sadness, frustration. But it was directed at the universe. That’s what I tapped into.

PDD: So what’s up next for you?

Hamilton: I’ve got about three projects in the works. We’ll see what my publisher wants next. The problem is never getting the idea for the next book. It’s narrowing down all the ideas to the one that you want to spend the next year working on. But I’ll be attending Bouchercon and touring for Damage Control into October. I hope to meet lots of readers and fellow writers, that’s the fun social part from me, when I can unchain from the computer and go out into the real world. Meanwhile, if you read Damage Control, I hope you enjoy it! Thanks for the opportunity to visit Poe’s Deadly Daughters. Speaking of which, Halloween is coming up. I think it’s time to re-read The Tell-Tale Heart to my kids.

PDD: Thanks for stopping by, Denise. And good luck with the book. You can read more about it on her website http://www.denisehamilton.com/

Bookstores

by Sheila Connolly

This past weekend, author Ann Patchett wrote a delightful short article called "On Bugs and Books" for the New York Times (sorry, but I don't think you can access the link unless you're a subscriber). It first caught my eye because of the "bugs" in the title, since my husband is a research entomologist, but in fact it turned out to be a piece linking book tours to 13-year cicadas—no easy feat.



Patchett doesn't like book tours: they make her anxious. I'm sure many writers can identify with that (at least, the ones who can afford book tours, with or without their publisher's help), but Patchett gracefully acknowledges that book tours are "the price of doing business."

 

But Patchett is doing more than following the script for successful writers: she's putting her money where her mouth it and will be opening a bookstore (yes, a real bricks-and-mortar one) in October. Why?



First of all, she believes that Americans are still reading books, based on what she saw on her book tour this summer, when people showed up at her signings carrying her books—including the more expensive hardcovers. Bookstores are still selling books, bless them. And her concept of the most functional bookstore in these rapidly changing days is the small, locally owned, independent bookstore. She sees this as part of an almost biological cycle: "the little bookstore grew into a big bookstore, which was squashed by the superstore, which folded beneath the Internet store, which made people long for a little bookstore"—all this in only 13 years. Wouldn't it be nice if the demise of Borders has yielded tiny sprouts of new, local bookstores?



As I may have mentioned before, my daughter has been working at a local independent bookstore for the past four years. It's a quirky place, much loved by its patrons. It's physically huge, with an amazing selection, including a lot of backlist. Admittedly they don't make it easy for anyone to find a book, since they're filed according to publisher and title, not author (a practice that always mystifies me). There are only two computer terminals on the floor for customers to use to search. So how do people find what they want? They ask people—the knowledgeable staff, many of whom have worked there for years.



But there's another important point about "real" bookstores: you can browse. I'll admit I buy books through Amazon. Often I want to find something that's out of print or obscure, and usually I can find a copy through one of Amazon's subcontractors, or whatever they're called. (Yes, I do use my local library, but often what I want isn't available, even through the regional system.) But I'm also very conscious of how Amazon manipulates its buyers, with phrases like "Customers who bought this item also bought…" or "Customers also bought items by…" or "Customers also considered…" I accept that it's good marketing, and Amazon recognizes that someone who likes a particular genre probably buys a lot of that genre.



But there's no serendipity. There's no joy in wandering the aisles, picking up whatever catches your fancy. There's no "aha!" moment on Amazon. In a physical bookstore you have the opportunity to find something you didn't even know you were looking for, and that's a pleasure. Or you can wander in and say to a clerk (like my daughter), "I'm looking for that new book—I think it's about a horse—I know the cover is blue or maybe green—she wrote something about rabbits a couple of years ago"—and you'll get an answer. Try putting "new+horse+blue+rabbits" into an Amazon search and see what you get.



So thank you, Ann Patchett, for take a stand and keeping the small bookstore alive. And, readers, if you're in the Nashville area any time from October on, stop in at Parnassus Books and vote with your pocketbook to prove Ann Patchett right and keep bookstores thriving.

Relationships in mystery series: perennial suspense or happily ever after?

Elizabeth Zelvin

Do you believe in “happily ever after”? If you read romance novels, you insist on it. While the classic fairy tales of Andersen and Grimm were often depressing and, well, grim, 20th-century American culture offered its children only tales that turned out well. In literary fiction too, the happy ending has been with us since Jane Austen. Many readers seek the satisfaction of conflict resolved in the personal lives of the characters they read about. Others protest that in reality, that moment of resolution is just the beginning of relationships that are true to life.

Mystery series offer writers, and thus readers, the opportunity to explore the arc of characters and their relationships over what in a prolonged series may amount to thousands of pages. The series format allows writers to give us a variety of relationship scenarios.

Some popular series authors suspend indefinitely their character’s choice of a permanent mate. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum forever hesitates between the reliable if somewhat high-handed Moretti and the mysterious, intensely sexy Ranger. Charlaine Harris has taken Sookie Stackhouse to what at first looked like true love with vampire Bill to a complicated series of relationships with vampire Eric and at least a couple of attractive shapeshifters.

Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone is perennially single with only a few ventures into romance. Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone had a series of failed relationships, none as important as her friendships with both men and women, before she found her soulmate in the unfortunately named Hy Ripinsky. Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski gets periodically involved with a man, but it’s certainly not the focus of her life and sometimes proves a pesky complication.

At least two bestselling authors, Elizabeth George and Dana Stabenow, have taken the radical step of killing off the soulmate: Thomas Lynley’s wife Helen and Kate Shugak’s true love Jack Morgan respectively, to the indignation of many readers. Going by past performance, I think George is going to torture Lynley before she lets him find love again. I found the mating dance between Stabenow’s Kate and her new partner Jim Chopin annoying—with Jim portrayed over the course of several books as a womanizer suddenly struck faithful by the sturdy, practical Kate’s irresistible sexual allure, and both concealing that they have any feelings whatever except for lust—until the most recent book, when they seem finally to be settling down to what I would call a relationship.

Even when authors let their character find a perfect partner, they may choose to postpone the happily ever after indefinitely by throwing one curve ball after another into the couple’s lives. Julia Spencer-Fleming’s ratcheting up of tension and heartache over the series has been masterful as Episcopal priest Clare Fergusson and Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne struggle with their feelings for each other. Readers may grind their teeth when Russ’s wife dies, and Clare, instead of falling into his arms, re-ups in the Army to go fly a helicopter in Iraq—but they couldn’t wait for the next book, when Clare came home. (If you haven’t read it, I won’t tell you what cliffhanger that one ends with.) Cynthia Harrod-Eagles put Inspector Bill Slider and the love of his life, Joanna—not to mention the reader—through agonies of frustration involving his awful marriage, her career as a violinist, his procrastination and guilt feelings, and of course the demands of The Job, ending each book with a whammy of a cliffhanger that had this reader groaning—and yes, eager for the next book.

And then there are the couples who, having achieved happily ever after, continue to evolve, whether dealing with further crises in the life cycle (pregnancy and child rearing; parents’ aging, illness, and death; the conflicting demands of career), not unlike what happens in real life. They may also continue to solve mysteries as partners. Deborah Crombie’s British detectives, Lloyd (first name nobody’s business) and Gemma James are doing a good job, as are Margaret Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott and Deputy Sheriff Dwight Bryant. So are Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in Jill Paton Walsh’s recent additions to Dorothy L. Sayers’s classic series. The latest one is a dilly, posing the couple a challenge you don’t often see in mysteries. On the other hand, something similar just happened to another of my favorite couples (not straight mystery, but a cross-genre series with plenty of mystery plotting), Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan and his wife Ekaterin. My prediction is that Walsh will let us see Peter and Harriet coping with their new condition, but the Vorkosigans, alas, may live happily ever after.