Living in the Past with Suzanne Adair

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

The novels of award-winning mystery/suspense author Suzanne Adair transport readers to the Southern theater of the Revolutionary War, where she brings historic towns, battles, and people to life. She fuels her creativity with Revolutionary War reenacting and visits to historic sites. When she’s not writing, she enjoys cooking, dancing, hiking, and spending time with her family. A Hostage to Heritage, her second Michael Stoddard American Revolution thriller, was released in April. 

Would you give us a brief summary of A Hostage to Heritage?

A Hostage to Heritage is the second of my historical thrillers set in Wilmington, North Carolina during the American Revolution, with redcoat Michael Stoddard as the criminal investigator. The story picks up just a few weeks after Michael’s first chronicled adventure, Regulated for Murder.

Here’s the description from the back cover:

A boy kidnapped for ransom. And a madman who didn't bargain on Michael Stoddard's tenacity.

Spring 1781. The American Revolution enters its seventh grueling year. In Wilmington, North Carolina, redcoat investigator Lieutenant Michael Stoddard expects to round up two miscreants before Lord Cornwallis's army arrives for supplies. But his quarries' trail crosses with that of a criminal who has abducted a high-profile English heir. Michael's efforts to track down the boy plunge him into a twilight of terror from radical insurrectionists, whiskey smugglers, and snarled secrets out of his own past in Yorkshire.

What kind of man is Michael Stoddard? What do you consider his greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses?

For those who enjoy mashup descriptions, Michael is Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe (but more polished) + Martin Freedman's Dr. Watson + Daniel Boone. And perhaps a pinch of Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden, without the magic.

So he’s moral without being priggish, intelligent, curious, courageous, and pragmatic. His greatest strength lies in his ability to see the big picture and not fixate on absolutes. So Michael sees the gray, not just the black and white. His greatest weakness? The compartmentalization he’s made of his emotions, mostly to deal with the horrors of war. He finds it difficult to speak his emotions.

After focusing on female leads in your first three books, why did you switch to writing about a male protagonist – and why a redcoat instead of an American?

Accounts you’ve read from the Revolutionary War are mostly written by American soldiers or the upper class. This means that we’ve seldom heard from Jane and Joe Average Colonist—small merchants, artisans, farmers—about the effect of the war on their lives. Demographically many people of the non-slave population were in this class. I realized that if I wrote about these people, a story of the American Revolution would emerge that wasn’t glorious or glamorous, but it would likely reflect the experience that most of our ancestors in the colonies had lived through.

So I wrote three books from a point of view under-represented in fiction: that of a middle-class colonial woman. Each of these women had a different journey, but they shared some messages in common. Danger and scarcity shaped their decisions and values. They weren’t fragile damsels or angels of the home, thus they used the innate strengths possessed by women throughout history to keep themselves alive and safe. And their narratives bore no resemblance to the stories in romance novels.



While I was writing the third book, I realized that there was another point of view under-represented in fiction about the American Revolution. Michael Stoddard, a young redcoat officer who's competent at criminal investigation, appears as a minor character in my first three books. It was time to let him tell his story.

I've developed Michael to show this world conflict from the supposed “loser’s” point of view. Michael challenges misconceptions Americans have of redcoats during the War of Independence. If the decisions and actions of those redcoats look familiar, it’s no coincidence. History repeats itself.

Do characters from your previous books appear in the Michael Stoddard novels?

Yes. I have a large cast to draw from. If it’s appropriate, characters from earlier books do show up. Readers comment that it’s like seeing old friends again. Since the party can get confusing with so many old friends, I’ve included a Dramatis Personae with A Hostage to Heritage and will add one to previous books. At the same time, I strive to write each book as standalone. A reader new to my series could pick up A Hostage to Heritage and navigate all the relationships while being intrigued (but not confused) by hints of what came before.

What sparked your interest in history? Did you have a great teacher, or were your parents history buffs? When did you focus on the American Revolution as your special interest, and why did you decide to explore the southern theater of the war in depth?

History class bored me—too much rote memorization—and neither of my parents was a history geek. But while growing up in south Florida, I heard too much of the mistaken notion that Florida’s history started with railroad barons Flagler and Plant in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. There was too little emphasis on St. Augustine, colonized by Spaniards decades before the English colonized Jamestown and, especially with its fort, an important holding for King George III during the American Revolution. I wished for a way to put Florida on the history map accurately. 

Castillo de San Marcos

I had always felt more affinity for the Revolutionary War than the Civil War, perhaps because so many folks from the north were living in the area of Florida where I was born and raised. In 1999, while I was living in Atlanta (and inundated with Scarlett O’Hara), I visited St. Simon’s Island in Georgia. There I found that Georgia, as the thirteenth colony, had a colonial past that was alive. I wandered the ruins of Ft. Frederica (artist’s rendering shows historical layout) and wondered why nobody had ever written an adventure set in Revolutionary War Georgia and Florida. Why did everyone focus on the northern theater when so much of significance happened in the southern theater?

 
  
Four months later, I was writing that adventure. It became Paper Woman and won the Patrick D. Smith Literature Award from the Florida Historical Society. I’d done my part at putting Florida on the history map accurately.

Most recorded history of the era seems to be about the leaders, the founding fathers and military leaders like Washington. How much material is available about the lives of ordinary men and women at that time? What did you come across that was particularly helpful in dramatizing the lives of common people caught up in the revolution?

What we know of the lives of ordinary people comes from personal information, such as letters and Bible records, and people’s records for business, home, and legal actions, as well as newspapers. Suppose an apothecary’s wife kept a transaction of household goods that she and her husband had to purchase or trade. (Most daughters of merchants, artisans, and farmers during the Revolution were taught to read and write and do basic math so they could help their husbands.) In the margin of the transaction record, the wife might jot down a recipe for blackberry cobbler. She might note if their kitchen building had burned, or a neighbor’s goats got into her garden and ate her cabbages. What you wouldn’t see in ordinary folks’ transactions records are entries for the purchase of bolts of expensive fabrics for ball gowns and crates of fine wine.

With the exceptions of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, towns weren’t large enough to shelter residents from the depredations of passing military units. People living in the hinterland were particularly vulnerable to military movement through their areas and might be killed when armies marched through. Armies offered them more protection than towns. Thus these folks often joined the ranks of those civilians who followed armies, just to save their lives. 

Many Revolutionary War reenacting units include a camp follower contingent. At weekend events, these folks set up living history demonstrations to show the public ways in which merchants, artisans, and retainers who accompanied an army interacted with soldiers and did their best to add normalcy to their lives. Some of these demonstrations include a hands-on component for the public. Of course, if you’re a reenactor, the entire weekend event is hands-on history. These hands-on activities have given me a clearer understanding of the challenges faced by my ancestors than the information I’ve found in books.
 
How do you find the voices of your historical characters? Most written materials, including personal letters, seem stiff and unnatural. Surely people didn’t speak that way in everyday conversation – but how do you know what their speech was really like? Have you found sources of slang or casual speech of the time?

No one today talks the way they write, so it’s reasonable to assume that this has always been the case historically. We don’t know for sure what the speech of anyone was like before technology enabled us to record voices. We can only make reasonable guesses.

We have written records of quite a bit of slang used during the Revolution. Slang has been part of human language forever. Where my reader audience can understand an eighteenth-century slang term from context, I’ll use it, if the use is appropriate. I avoid modern slang but stick to modern speech rhythms. This middle ground is used by many writers of historicals. Dialog that sounds too modern or too archaic will yank most readers out of the story. We don’t want that to happen.

Here’s a brief essay I wrote in 2010 about crafting speech for my Revolutionary characters. In it, I discuss how I questioned readers to find out what kind of dialog they found most natural in historical novels:

How often do you participate in historical re-enactments, and what roles do you play? Do you wear historically accurate clothing – including the underwear? Is it comfortable? Can we assume the clothing of women who were camp followers wasn’t as restrictive as stylish women’s clothes?

Before I was published, I attended a reenactment or living history event about once a month. Now I’m so busy with writing that I attend perhaps three per year. I always portray a retainer—along with sutlers and artisans, one of the types of non-combatants (modern term: camp follower) associated with an army.

I wear historically accurate clothing. A middle-class woman traveling with an army stayed in the company of a male relative such as her husband, father, or brother. She’d likely wear the following ensemble: a shift (the underwear), petticoat, short, boned jacket, apron, mobcap, stockings, and shoes. If she didn’t expect to lend a hand with cooking, hospital duty, laundering, or sewing, she might wear stays and a long gown, and big panniers. The short, boned jacket allowed a woman’s upper torso more flexibility than stays with a long gown, so yes, it wasn’t as restrictive.

Is it comfortable? Hah! In the summer, it’s hot as the dickens, and sweat plasters the shift to my legs. No one can run very quickly in the clothing. If it gets wet in a downpour, all those yards of fabric become quite heavy. And sometimes the wind can whip the petticoat into an open campfire, setting the material afire. Every year, that happens to a few reenactor women. I had my petticoat whipped into the flames once, but we grabbed it out before it caught fire. In the eighteenth century, being burned was one of the top causes of death for women.

Have you fired the weapons used in the war? What other research have you done in order to write accurately about the lives of men on the battlefield?

I’ve loaded and fired both a musket and a pistol with powder, the way it’s done during the battle reenactments. I’ve also fixed a bayonet on the business end of a musket and received lessons in swinging a saber. On one occasion, we went way out in the woods away from people so I could load and fire a musket ball and get an idea of the difference in the recoil between that and a musket fired with powder alone. The musket ball hit a pine tree at what would have been chest height on an adult. I swaggered for a few seconds before I realized that the ball had ricocheted somewhere, just as it might have done in a battle. One of us could have been killed by that. I haven’t fired any musket balls since then.

I learned to start a fire with flint and steel. (What an exercise in hyperventilation. Matches weren’t invented until the nineteenth century.) My hat’s off to my ancestors who could start a fire with flint and steel in the wind or rain.

 

I’ve cooked over many wood fires (and burned plenty of food that way), slept in canvas army tents without mosquito netting, and gone without running water and heat/AC for entire weekends. Refrigerators, electricity, and flush toilets seem like miracles after those weekends.

During the after-hours at many weekend reenactments, there’s a social event that usually involves dancing to fiddle music. Most soldiers would have participated in such entertainment. It was another way to inject normalcy into their lives. Many steps in these country dances (do-si-do, swing, allemande, etc.) are used in modern square dances and contra dances.

Where can people go to get the flavor of the time in homes and towns, away from the battlefield? Which historical sites have you most enjoyed visiting?

Sites like Colonial Williamsburg and the Joel Lane Museum House aren’t associated with any battle reenactments, although activities connected with these sites might occasionally include a military drill. These sites are great places to get a sense of the eighteenth century on the scale of a town, nobleman’s estate, or homestead of an ordinary person. Full-time employees provide the living history element.

Other sites such as Historic Brattonsville, House in the Horseshoe, and Historic Camden provide visitors with the sense of eighteenth-century homesteads and lifestyles while hosting annual battle reenactments. There aren’t as many regular employees providing the living history at these sites. Reenactors do a lot of the hands-on history at the annual events.

Each site I’ve visited has its own charm. The immense scope of what’s available to people who are in search of living history—from entire town to farm, from mansion to small home—reinforces the fact that war knows no boundaries.

Many – most? – students find history dull and irrelevant to their lives. Do you have any suggestions for teachers (or parents) who want to get kids excited about history and make them understand the events that created our country?

Make history as hands-on as possible.

When I became involved in Revolutionary War reenacting, my sons were in early elementary school. I brought them into the reenacting with me. Even though I could see how much they enjoyed themselves at every event, I had no idea that all that hands-on involvement would give both of them an appreciation of history from many time periods.

 

I also had no idea that participating with Crown forces reenactors all those years would help my sons understand that there are at least two sides to every argument, and that in military actions, the soldiers on neither side consider themselves to be the villains. Showing history, rather than telling it, makes the past relevant, fun, and worthy of study.

Thank you for the interview, Sandy!

Visit Suzanne's website at http://www.SuzanneAdair.com for more information.

Right Brain or Left Brain

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I was reading a review in the New Yorker about a crime-themed television show and came upon the citation of the following statement from the "showrunner" (I'm still trying to figure out what that title means) of a different crime-themed television show, who had said that:

Either it's a left-brain journey, where you're just connecting the dots of who the suspects are, or it's more of a holistic journey where a young girl is murdered, these are the potential subjects, and this is why.

I said "aha!" because this resonates with me:  I argue with my editor all the time about it.  I'm usually far more interested in why the victim ended up dead—who would have wanted to kill him/her?—than in setting up a list of possible suspects and knocking them off the fence one at a time.

The thing is, I seem to be a right-brain writer, but I'm a left-brain person.  Oh, I know, my editor is saying now, "but where's your protagonist's emotional response to the body/the big reveal?" I'll concede that my protagonists tend to be observers and analysts.  They do not dissolve into floods of tears in a crisis, they simply take in the situation and act accordingly.  So I'm a macro right-brain writer, but a micro left-brain one.

I know, this is over-simplified.  Nobody is entirely one or the other.  I did, however, take a quickie on-line test and it showed overwhelming left-brain dominance.  I wasn't surprised.

What's the basic definition?  Right brain:  emotional, intuitive, creative; likes music, images and colors.  Left brain:  prefers logic and reasoning; is more comfortable with language (putting things into words rather than responding emotionally) and numbers.  Think Kirk vs. Spock, Napoleon Solo vs. Ilya Kuriakin, or…Castle vs. Beckett?  Of the first two pairs, you can guess which one I preferred.  For the last…I'd like to hang out with Castle, but I'd rather be Beckett.

Maybe I'm just confused.  I was once an art historian, so I must like images.  Except that I spent a lot of time analyzing images, not wallowing in their beauty.  Pretty colors make me happy.  But then, I love languages, which may explain why I can speaks bits and pieces of at least five.  But I hate math.  Still, overall I like to think of myself as logical and analytical.

But does that work for writing?  To me, understanding human interactions, and an individual's response to particular circumstances, and then conveying that effectively to readers, is the best possible goal. We talk about "character-driven" versus "plot-driven" stories, and it should be noted that the great majority of mystery readers are women, who are generally credited with greater emotional responses, so they should (in theory) respond to the first category.  On the flip side, male readers tend to prefer books in which taciturn men blow things up and shoot people, with the occasional detour to spend about fifteen minutes with a woman (think Jack Reacher). Funny thing—the latter sell better and get more press.  Go figure.

When we write in a genre, and I do since I'm a full-blown cozy writer, we know there are guidelines to be followed.  If the genre is thrillers, there must be, well, thrills; in cozies, there must be cats and crafts and kooky sidekicks.  I get that.  But I keep trying to sneak in a few more substantial elements, and I think I've arrived at what one reviewer called a "meaty" cozy.  I like that. Maybe my two brains are actually working and playing together these days.

How Medium Affects Storytelling

Elizabeth Zelvin

As a lifelong writer, I’ve told my stories in a variety of media: novels, short stories, poetry, and songs. Running through all of them are the threads we call theme: what I have to say to the world, woven into the fabric of the story. Certain themes recur in what I hope it doesn’t sound too pompous to call my body of mature work. Some of these are the universal themes of creative artists, such as love and family. Others refer to my work as a psychotherapist and addiction specialist: alcoholism and recovery, abuse and healing.These are subjects I feel passionate about, and I have returned to them again and again.

I write very differently about these themes depending on the medium. I don’t do it deliberately. I don’t consciously inject the issue into the story. Nor do I consciously say to myself, “Oops, this is a short story, not a novel so I’ve got to do it this way; it’s a song, not a poem, so I’ve got to do it that way.” But on an intuitive level, I choose the voice, pace, and vocabulary most appropriate to the form I’m working in at the time.

My mystery series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler includes three novels, four short stories, and a novella. The title of the first novel, Death Will Get You Sober, states the theme of the series: that investigating murders will be the catalyst for Bruce’s recovery. Bruce’s voice is sardonic but candid. In the first scene, after waking up in detox on the Bowery, Bruce says, “To tell the truth, I felt like hell. My mouth tasted like a garbage scow, my memory was on lockdown, and I bitterly regretted not being dead by thirty the way I’d always thought I’d be.” At the end of the book, he’s changed enough to be able to say, “For a giddy moment, I felt ...joyful. Like a guy with a best friend. Like a guy with a future.” Because it’s a novel, there’s room for me to give a lot of detail about recovery and Alcoholics Anonymous as Bruce and his friends go about their sleuthing and a couple of scenes devoted solely to his ambivalence to and struggle with sobriety.

In the short stories, I have to skate much more lightly over the recovery theme, even though not only is it crucial to Bruce’s character, but it also supplies key elements of the plot. I have to make every word count. “Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down” starts: “When I got sober, I thought I’d had it with drunken strangers.” Bruce invites an Australian he meets in Starbucks home and then can’t get him to leave. On page 3, he says, “I couldn’t get him to AA either, though I tried. I succeeded in getting his beer out of my refrigerator, where it looked dangerously at home.” And then the guy gets killed and the investigation begins.

Here’s a poem on the same subject but in a completely different voice and diction, from my book, Gifts and Secrets: Poems of the Therapeutic Relationship.

HITTING BOTTOM

he was in a blackout when he broke the fish tank

he remembers pouring one more shining cataract
for drunken trout to leap deliriously upstream
spawning on his lips the songs, the curses
lies, excuses, broken promises

next thing he knew, he lay like Gulliver
a giant among the jagged shards of glass
cut to the heart to see the blood red swordtails
lying like abandoned scarves
goldfish copper bright as pennies spent
iridescent rainbows trampled out
flowing fins and tails like wingbeats stilled

next day he found his first church basement

the commonality of grief and shame
the hope, license to speak the truth
the unexpected presence of laughter
so hard, so simple, such relief
to say his name and add
I’m an alcoholic

And finally, here’s the same story told as a song in a voice that’s different from both Bruce’s and the poet’s, from my album, Outrageous Older Woman. It’s called “The Still.” Click, play, and enjoy!

A Bailout for Publishing? Seriously?

by Sandra Parshall

James Patterson is right when he complains that all the talk about publishing these days is negative, focused on the industry’s decline without offering any solutions. But is he really proposing a government bailout?

Last week Patterson placed an ad in Kirkus Reviews and The New York Times Book Review, and on both covers of Publishers Weekly, asking “Who will save our books? Our bookstores? Our libraries?” The ad read in part: "The Federal Government has stepped in to save banks, and the automobile industry, but where are they on the important subject of books? Why are there no impassioned editorials in influential newspapers or magazines?"

The four-page PW ad lists 46 novels and nonfiction books under these questions:
“What will happen to American literature?”
“Who will publish important books like these?”
“Who will help save America’s books?”
“Who will mentor and encourage our authors in the future?”
“Who will recommend books like these to the American public?”

Most of the fiction titles he lists as representative of America’s best are literary novels or modern classics by Hemingway, Faulkner, Harper Lee, etc., but he also includes books by Thomas Harris and James M. Cain.

The world’s bestselling thriller writer may not produce books that could be called “literature” but he is a passionate advocate of reading who has donated thousands of books to U.S. troops stationed abroad, founded a program that encourages children to read, and given time and money to literacy programs. He told PW in an interview that he hoped his ads would turn the discussion of publishing’s survival in a more practical direction. Currently, he said, publishers are in a “Woe is me” rut and the media produce the same “publishing is in trouble” story over and over. He urged publishers to “Get in attack mode.”

Exactly where that attack would be aimed is unclear. PW senior writer Andrew Albanese said in response to Patterson’s ads that “The book is changing, for sure. And reading is under pressure,” but whether “the book” is endangered is debatable.

Patterson’s ad doesn’t mention the phenomenal rise of the e-book, although it’s impossible to discuss traditional publishing’s decline without naming the main cause of it. The figures tell the obvious story: as digital sales continue to rise, print sales continue to drop. But there’s a lot more to it than simple sales numbers.

Some writers are so disgusted with traditional publishing that they would love to drive a stake through its heart, and they think all writers should jump at the chance to take control and self-publish. However, we’re seeing more and more successful self-published writers accepting offers from traditional imprints and happily turning over all the grunt work of publishing to professional editors and marketing departments. Many traditionally published writers might dabble in self-publishing but would never give up the very real advantages of bringing out their books the old-fashioned way. As long as traditional publishing attracts talented writers, including those who start by self-publishing, it will stay alive.

Everybody seems to agree on one thing, though: traditional publishing has to change, perhaps drastically, and adapt to the new realities of the book world. Unfortunately, nobody appears to know how it should change. Merely adding digital departments to process e-books doesn’t look like the answer, when so many other aspects of the business are outdated and writers and readers alike are unhappy with everything from pricing to marketing to the often poor quality of the product.

Will the federal government step in and bail out publishing? Not likely. Publishing is a comparatively small industry. If it failed completely, it wouldn’t bring down the economy, and the economic impact is all Congress cares about. However, local communities and states have a duty to keep public libraries open and provide funding to pay staff and keep both print and digital collections up to date. That is a use of public money that benefits everyone, but library funds are among the first to be cut when communities are faced with deficits.

The good news is the “the book” is alive and well. It's not always in the form of pages between two covers, but it isn’t about to vanish. Many owners of e-readers report that they are reading more than ever because digital books are less expensive than print and can be purchased in seconds. Book discussion communities are thriving online, and face-to-face book clubs are more popular than ever. Readers will find the books they like, regardless of how they're published. Patterson asks: Who will recommend good books to the public? The answer: Other readers will. Favorable word of mouth has always been the best way to sell a book.

Avid readers and book-buyers have never been in the majority – writers realize that the market for our products is small compared to that for pop songs or action movies – but they are passionate about the written word. As long as readers love to read and writers feel compelled to write, “the book” – in whatever form it might take – will live on.

Brand versus Platform

Sharon Wildwind

What’s the difference between a brand and a platform? I should ask what’s the difference between a brand, a platform, and a platform because there are now two common definitions for platform and one looks very different from the other.

The original meaning I learned for platform was that it was where real life met writing. We’re all interested in something; some of us may even be obsessed. In a nice way, of course. Platforms come out of our work, our causes, our hobbies, and our personal interests. 

A platform connection is vital because selling ourselves as a writer no longer works. I live in a big city. So do hundreds of other writers. If I called  a newspaper, a radio or television station, the people won’t be interested that I have a new book. I stand a better chance of being noticed if I can offer a story with a platform connected to it.

I’m interested in local history and have unearthed a fascinating story about a hotel loaned to the Red Cross during World War I to use as a convalescent hospital. The Red Cross minutes, photos, and other material is in a local archive. The 100th anniversary of the 1914 declaration of war rolls around in eighteen months, and I bet I can get a couple of nibbles if I say, “I know a great story about a convalescent hospital in Calgary during the war.” That’s marketing using my platform.

A brand is the thread that runs through everything we write. Discovering my brand was fun. The woman who helped me find it suggested using pop culture to identify what my filters trapped. What movies did I like? Why? What photographs always caught my attention? What newspaper articles? What pop songs? What cliches appealed to me, even though I knew they were cliches and would never use them in writing? What quotes inspired me, and why? Who were my heroes and heroines? Out of that we built a list of values. Those values became my brand.

Platform (the second version) has also come to mean where in the vast social media world are we going to put our time and effort.  The public speaker and author, Michael Hyatt, wrote a great explanation of that kind of platform. His question: Do You Have a Personal Platform Plan for 2013? His idea is that we should think of ourselves as a country who is sending our ambassadors to other countries.

All ambassadors need a place to call home. We own and control our media homes because we spend the most time and energy making home look and feel right. We also need to establish embassies: places where we have a consistent presence. These are places of outreach and can be used to drive traffic back to our home base. Finally, we need to visit outposts: places where show up infrequently, possibly for outreach but for exploration as well.

Dividing my social media sites into three lists—home, embassies, and outposts—helped me identify where I wanted to spend the most time and energy, and not feel guilty if I visited my outposts only three or four times a month.

Remember how characters should have both public and private stakes? So should writers. Platforms are our public stakes, the way we connect to non writers. Brands are our private stakes. They're at the heart of what we mean when we write the kind of story we'd like to read.

We're good at raising stakes for our characters. How about we raise a few for ourselves as well? Is it time to take another look at our platforms and brands?

Quote for the week:

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

~William Plomer (1903 – 1973), South African and British novelist, poet, and literary editor

Television Worth The Binge

by Julia Buckley

Entertainment Weekly did a feature last week about the tv shows worthy of watching all at once--episode after episode--because they are addictive and provide a quality experience (and probably the same level of discussion that a good book would provide).

Since the world is now full of DVDs with complete series on them, and since many people can easily download these series on Netflix or Hulu, the idea of spending a weekend or more slamming one's way through an entire series has become a whole new form of entertainment.  (Although it's not necessarily  new: on one snowy New Year's Day back in the 80s, my husband and I stumbled across a DALLAS marathon on some tv station and ended up watching about ten episodes).

In any case, I decided to recommend my own top three, in case anyone out there might be looking for a new series to discover.  So here they are:

1. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

This, while it was on, was called "the best show nobody is watching" by one critic, and it remains the freshest, cleverest show I've ever seen on television. All three seasons are available on DVD, but thanks to the demand of fans, the show is coming back with a fourth season on May 4 on Netflix.  Before you watch Season Four, it would make sense to watch Seasons 1-3 to find out what the fuss is about.  The show has an unparalleled ensemble cast with greats such as Ron Howard (who narrates), Jason Bateman, Jessica Walter, David Cross, Will Arnett, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale, Michael Cera, Portia de Rossi, and Jeffrey Tambor.  Here's a quick taste of what makes this show about a dysfunctional family so funny:

2. DEADWOOD

If you have an aversion to swearing, sex and violence, then you might find this HBO show shocking, but it's those three things that make DEADWOOD seem so raw, authentic, and powerful. Set in 1870s Deadwood, South Dakota, it powerfully captures the paradoxical notions of lawlessness and community.  Here's Wikipedia's summation: " The series charts Deadwood's growth from camp to town, incorporating themes ranging from the formation of communities to western capitalism. The show features a large ensemble cast, and many historical figures appear as characters on the show—such as Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen, Wild Bill Hickok, Sol Star, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, George Crook, E. B. Farnum, Charlie Utter, Jack McCall and George Hearst. The plot lines involving these characters include historical truths as well as substantial fictional elements. Milch used actual diaries and newspapers from 1870s Deadwood residents as reference points for characters, events, and the look and feel of the show. Some of the characters are fully fictional, although they may have been based on actual persons."


If I were able to give my own best actor awards, I would give ALL of them to the great Robin Weigert, who plays Calamity Jane as an "unkempt, foul-mooded, foul-mouthed drunkard" (to quote Wikipedia again) and steals absolutely every scene that she is in.  Here's a taste of DEADWOOD, to the tune of a Johnny Cash song:









3. BREAKING BAD

Everyone who has watched it knows why I'm recommending this AMC series.  Initially I didn't want to watch it at all.  The premise--that a high school science teacher who found out he had lung cancer would start to make and sell meth in order to provide for his family when he dies--was not at all my cup of tea.  But more and more people assured me I should watch it, so I did.  And by the time I was three episodes into it, I couldn't stop--it was full-fledged tv show addiction.

Between the bleak New Mexico setting and the amazing character chemistry between Bryan Cranston's Walter White and Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman, this show is drama at its most powerful--and literary.  Again and again I saw Shakespearean parallels to this story of a good man gone bad--most notably to MACBETH, who starts the play as a good and honorable man, and ends as a fiend.

Here's a taste of the powerful performances in this show:


Okay, these are my top three recommendations. Which have you watched? Do any of these recommendations make you want to binge on one of these shows?

The Plot Is in the Characters

by Kay Kendall
Author of Desolation Row


I don’t give a fig how a car works. Or electricity. 
Or a computer. They all might as well be black boxes, as far as I’m concerned, inside which mysterious things happen. Poof! The car turns on. Poof! Electricity powers the air conditioner. Poof! The computer recalls everything you type into it. 

What I do care about is how people work. Why they do the things they do. I discovered this passion one teenaged summer when my boyfriend dumped me and I drooped into churlishness. After a week my mother tired of my moping around the house and suggested I work at one of her charities. 

I ended up volunteering at the county’s psychiatric clinic, helping with rudimentary clerical tasks. As I typed up forms and patients’ reports, I was shocked to see so much pain appear on the pages. But later I was gratified to see the clinic’s psychiatric social worker help some of those patients whose woes I’d typed up. Sometimes they left our office with springier steps. I fancied I could see their anxieties and depression lift, if only a little.

That same summer my favorite cousin began exhibiting behavioral problems. Merle was super bright but troubled. I never saw him act out or be mean to someone, but I began to hear stories.  I wanted to help him but didn’t have the skills. Ah-hah, I thought! I’d study psychology in college and become a psychiatric social worker so I could fix him.

Please note that I never aspired to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Perhaps that was because I’d only seen a psychiatric social worker in action and therefore could imagine being one. But also note the date was 1962, the year before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.  And eight years before I became an ardent feminist. 

When I entered college in 1963, most courses I took fascinated me, including for a short time even geology and astronomy, subjects taken only to fulfill liberal arts distribution requirements. Psychology, however, was a letdown, a huge bore. 

I wanted to learn about people. All we studied were rats. While two friends in my class did manage to cope with rodentia behavior, I couldn’t.  These women went on to earn their doctorates in psychology and help countless people. For me, however, the gap between the actions of rats and people was too great a leap. I never took another course after Psych 1.

I toyed with various majors, but English literature was my mainstay. Fiction encompassed everything about humanity, and I’d always been a ferocious reader. Writing was a joy. After getting a graduate degree in history—real crimes that happened in the past, I now say—I fell back on writing and developed a solid career as a corporate communicator. 

I never felt I’d found my niche, however. My heart did not sing.

When I began writing fiction a decade ago, I finally responded to an inner compulsion. What I had to explore is why people do the things they do. Character development and plot are almost synonymous to me. It’s like attending another high school reunion and seeing old friends again after ten years. I’m reading the newest chapters in their lives. People are walking, ongoing stories. Curiosity drives me to learn everything I can and then fictionalize it—showing their behavior and uncovering their motives.

The mystery comes in when good people do bad things. Anne Perry was the first mystery author I noticed whose killers weren’t thoroughly evil, but I didn’t know what to make of this. And then the film Heavenly Creatures came out in 1994, exposing her secret. As a teenager she had helped murder a friend’s mother. Maybe Anne Perry has been trying to fathom her motives ever since? No wonder the killers she devised—especially in the first half of her career—are complicated, unfathomable people, jolted into acting horribly in bad situations. 

Each of us is a mysterious black box. Inside are so many factors all jumbled up—memories, desires, hurts. How can other people ever hope to understand us? How can we hope to understand ourselves?

Yet still we try. We must try. I was never able to decode what caused my cousin Merle to derail. I did solve part of the puzzle but was helpless to alter his sad trajectory. Alas, after living for twenty years in a hospital for the criminally insane, he wandered off into a field while on furlough and simply lay down and died. He was forty.

As a mystery author, though, I can put characters into extreme peril and see if they’ll sort out their own complicated lives as well as the sometimes vile things that others do. Solving the puzzles of people living only on pages (or in E files) is a full-time job. After I figure out one set of interconnecting lives, then I go on to develop another set, another, and another. This is a job I relish. You can call me a contented Sisyphus.

Kay Kendall’s debut mystery, Desolation Row, is set in 1968 and features 22-year-old Austin Starr, homesick Texas bride of a Vietnam War draft protester. When her husband is accused of murdering a fellow draft resister, the black sheep son of a U.S. Senator, Austin must prove her husband’s innocence. Learn more about Kay and her writing at http://www.kaykendalauthor.com.

Deadlines

by Sheila Connolly

April carries the weight of everyone's least favorite deadline:  Tax Day.  April 15th strikes fear into the hearts of many, and inspires annual surges of loathing.  Yes, I mailed my federal taxes on April 15th; I managed to send my state taxes electronically on the 14th (for the first time), yay me.

We as writers face deadlines all the time.  Admittedly I have more than many do, since I write three series, by choice.  Actually I was pleased when that arrangement was formalized, because it meant that I knew what my forward schedule would be for years, rather than book to book. Same due date for drafts, same month of publication, for each series, stretching out to 2015 at least.  It's good to know what's coming.

Of course, there are other writing-related things that have to be fit into the intervals, like conferences and research trips.  Yes, I do research for all my series.  It's such a burden to have to sit in pubs in Ireland or tour museums in Philadelphia or visit harvest festivals in western Massachusetts.  Poor me (not!).

There are studies that suggest that many people work better and think smarter when under pressure (i.e., with a looming deadline). I've always felt that way.  Even in high school, I had a well-calibrated sense of how long it would take me to accomplish something, and how long I could defer it before starting.  No, I wasn't the kind who pulled an all-nighter right before a major paper was due, but I know I needed a certain sense of urgency to spur me.  Apparently I'm not alone.

Which doesn't explain the high school honors history course I took, where we were all assigned one research paper due in the spring. A couple of days before the paper was due, our teacher asked the class, "who has started the paper?"  Nobody raised his or her hand.  Defeated, he cancelled it.  I'm still not sure what went wrong.  We were all smart, hardworking, college-bound kids, but maybe we had no idea what went into researching a topic (remember, this was before the Internet).  But I never waited that long to start anything again.

When you're working on something creative, there's always the lurking question, what if I run dry at the wrong time?  What if I can't figure out how to end this thing and it just sputters to a halt?  Is it better or worse to submit a product that you know isn't your best, that still needs some fixing, rather than missing that all-important deadline?  If you've got a good editor, he or she is going to notice, and it's not fair to rely on the editor to remedy your mistakes, when you know you're in the wrong.

But if you miss that first deadline, is it the beginning of the end?  Will you start getting sloppy after that?  Ah, what the heck, it's just a date.  What's a few more days? Or weeks?  But then you run the risk of being labeled undependable by your publisher, and we all know that there are a lot of eager writers waiting to grab any slot that opens up. 

Me, I need the structure.  I like being able to look out at my coming year and know what's coming, and when.  I'm not a hare, I'm a tortoise, slow and steady.

And very busy!

Those Golden Age Detectives

Elizabeth Zelvin

In the Golden Age of detective fiction, several British mystery writers, all women, reigned more or less co-supreme: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and, writing a bit later, New Zealand-born Ngaio Marsh.

Let’s take Christie first and get her out of the way, because her mysteries differ from those of the others in several respects. For one thing, the world she portrays is rather middlebrow. Hercule Poirot, one of her enduring detectives, is an eccentric Belgian, played for laughs, who stands outside the parade of English society. He has no personal life and no genuine emotions apart from a mild compassion for some of the victims of the crimes he solves and an occasional burst of vanity. The other, that unlikely sleuth, Miss Marple, is a middle-class resident of a village in which society consists of such stock characters as the vicar, the doctor and the squire—hardly elevated enough to be invited to dinner, say, at Downton Abbey, unless no other company is expected.

In Christie’s mysteries, the puzzle is all. If her plots seem clichéd to today’s readers, it’s because the twists that were fresh and original in her work have spawned so many imitators. I doubt that anyone would call her stories character driven. The Poirot and Miss Marple series have no arc; their characters are unchanging and eternal.

On the other hand, Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, and Marsh’s Detective Chief Inspector (later Superintendent and Chief Superintendent) Roderick Alleyn have a lot in common. Lord Peter is the brother of the Duke of Devon; Campion is the pseudonymous scion of a family of unnamed but elevated rank, perhaps a ducal younger son himself. Alleyn is the younger brother of a rather stuffy baronet, Sir George. All of them mingle freely with characters across a broad spectrum of society. None of them are snobs in the conventional sense. Yet inherent in the value system and lifestyle of all three is the peculiarly English concept of being “a gentleman.”

At its best, being a gentleman implies unassailable integrity, and that, certainly, is common to all three sleuths. A sense of chivalry and/or noblesse oblige (without hairsplitting over the difference) is deeply ingrained in them by their upbringing. They solve crimes to right wrongs—as well as, in the case of Campion and Lord Peter, because it’s fun.

However, these sleuthing gentlemen take for granted an entitlement based on class. As today’s viewers of Downton Abbey are constantly reminded, traditional British class structure took some direct hits during World War I and crumbled gently thereafter during the decades in which our detectives operated. But gentlemen still knew who they were and recognized the boundaries between their class and others’. In Downton Abbey, Bates was Lord Grantham’s batman in the War, as Bunter was Lord Peter’s. In civilian life, the lords expect to be dressed, groomed, and waited on, and the intelligent and loyal far-more-than-valets cheerfully provide these services. Campion’s “man,” the cheerfully irreverent Cockney ex-burglar Lugg, is similarly both servant and sidekick. Instead of a devoted lifelong servant, Alleyn has Detective Sergeant (later Inspector) Fox.

Class distinctions carry over from the detectives’ private life to their investigations. When a murder is committed, the gentleman sleuths interview the gentry, while Fox, Lugg, and Bunter make themselves at home in the servants’ hall, chatting up the cook, the butler, and the whole roster down to the youngest tweeny, speaking the vernacular over cozy cups of tea.

In spite of these iconic characteristics, all three of these great detectives demonstrate personal growth in the course of the series—Lord Peter the most, as he evolves from silly-ass-about-town in the early books to a character of such depth, complexity, and sensitivity that it is widely believed that his creator, Sayers herself, fell in love with him.

All find partners outside the rigid social boundaries of birth. Alleyn marries Troy, an acclaimed artist; Lord Peter, a mystery writer, a doctor’s daughter he first meets when she is on trial for murder; and Campion, Lady Amanda Fitton, an aristocrat, to be sure, but one who is happiest messing about with airplanes as an aeronautics expert. Their marriages draw all three sleuths into a growing maturity that lifts their investigations far above the realm of mere puzzle.

Mystery Times Two... or Three

By Sandra Parshall

More and more mystery authors are producing two or even three series simultaneously, and I have to admit they make me feel like a slug. I admire their hard work and dedication to their writing careers, but I always wonder why they do it and whether it interferes with their personal lives. So I posed those two questions to a few friends who are on the fast track with multiple series.

Deb Baker began with the Gertie Johnson series set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then added the Gretchen Birch Dolls to Die For series. She now writes the Queen Bee Mysteries as Hannah Reed. Don’t be surprised if she brings out yet another new series sometime soon. 

Why do you do it? Is your imagination overflowing with ideas that demand outlets, are you just a workaholic, or do you have another reason?

At the beginning, I couldn’t sell a thing and had multiple books circulating. Finally, a publisher offered a three book contract for one of them, and three weeks later another publisher made an offer for three books in another. How could I say no? That decision produced a long period of high stress accompanied by an insidious fear that I couldn’t do it. But somehow I managed. As my writing experience grew and my characters developed, the stories came faster and faster. It now takes me between 3 and 4 months to produce a novel, if I can stay focused.

How does the work load affect your life -- and do you ever wish you had more free time?

I love my work, so it’s all play for me! My family and friends are important, so I make time for them. But I never feel the need to go on vacation to escape my desk. Instead, I’m lucky enough to have arranged a life I don’t need to run from.

Clea Simon writes the Dulcie Schwatrz series for Poisoned Pen Press and the Pru Marlowe Pet Noir series for Severn. Both feature cats prominently.

Why do you do it?  

I began doing concurrent series by accident. I had one ms. out circulating (Shades of Grey - YEARS before the S&M erotica of the same name - my first Dulcie Schwartz feline mystery) and then I finished another (Dogs Don't Lie, my first Pru Marlowe pet noir), because that's what you do while you're waiting for something to sell. Then both sold, and both publishers wanted the books to be the start of a series. I love them both, so I said, sure. At the time, the scheduling seemed reasonable. I do try to keep notes for both series current, because sometimes I'll have a Pru thought while I'm working on Dulcie and vice versa. It's a little difficult to switch between the voices -- I get caught up in whichever I'm working on -- but it does keep life interesting.
How does the work load affect your life -- and do you ever wish you had more free time?

RIght now, I have no life. I have one ms. due May 31 and one due on June 1. I have one ms. fully drafted and another nearly drafted, so I'll switch off and revise one, then revise the other, but it's a little too close for comfort. 

I should have been working on these books much earlier, but I was both waiting for contracts to be renewed and also dealing with some family issues, and so... I put them off. So, well, I guess I had my free time! Once these are in, I'll be able to relax. At least until the edits come back.
 
Sheila Connolly began her career by writing the work-for-hire Glassblower Mysteries for Berkley under the pseudonym Sarah Atwell. The first in the series was nominated for an Agatha Award. Now she divides her time between the Orchard Series, the Museum Series, and a new series set in Ireland. 

Why do you do it?

Multiple reasons. (1) When I first started writing, I had to justify to myself (and probably to my husband, although he didn't voice it) that I was taking the whole writing thing seriously and working hard at it. (2) I wanted to explore different approaches within the genre, which is how I ended up with one series set in rural Massachusetts, one in center city Philadelphia, and one in another country altogether. (3) I think I must be a workaholic, because I feel guilty every time I do something that isn't writing related, like house repairs or gardening. But then, I find most (not all!) aspects of writing fun, so I'm not exactly suffering. 

I have to say, I did not start out with any plan in mind, because I had no clue how long it would take to write a book, much less how time-consuming all the secondary stuff would be. The multiple series kind of came organically, once I figured out my own pacing.

I should add that after the Sarah Atwell series, all mine are ones that I chose and developed. I'm sure Berkley would be happy to have me write another one of their pre-fab series, but I'm not interested.
 
How does the work load affect your life -- and do you ever wish you had more free time?

Not really, because it's kind of a seamless life. Genealogy has long been my primary hobby, and at times my professional occupation, and in all of my books I get to indulge that (although not so much for my own family tree). I love to travel, and I've found a way to visit all my favorite places--and make it tax-deductible! I love being my own boss and keeping my own hours, but in fact that may take up more time than any full-time job outside the home did, since I'm at my desk by eight most days, and I work weekends. But I do it because I love it--and when it all comes together, it's better than sex, drugs and rock and roll. Occasionally.

Lorraine Bartlett/Lorna Barrett began with the Jeff Resnick series, written as L.L. Bartlett. She now writes the Booktown Mysteries as Lorna Barrett and the Victoria Square Mysteries under her own name.
    

   



















Why do you do it?

I have tons of ideas for new stories/series, and I am most definitely a workaholic. (On my last vacation in January, I wrote 46,000 words spread over four different projects (and in 3 weeks). Three of those projects are already for sale as e titles.)

How does the work load affect your life -- and do you ever wish you had more free time?

What’s free time?

 


Leslie Budewitz, a Montana attorney, won an Agatha Award for Books, Crooks, and Counselors, a guide for authors who write about crime and the law. Her first love is fiction, though, and although her first mystery in the       Food Lovers Village series won’t be out until August, she’s already under contract to write the Seattle Spice Shop Mysteries (coming in 2014).

Why do you do it? 

Ever since I was a small girl, my dream has been to write fiction. Now that I have the opportunity, I want to make the most of it. I have always been a very “placed” writer, aware of how strongly setting influences our perspective and experiences. Writing two series allows me to explore that more deeply.

How does your heavy writing schedule affect your life? Do you ever wish you had more free time?
 
I can write two series only because my day job is winding down and I’d rather write than find another. My conversation does seem to revolve around writing, though! And I’m hoping for a garden fairy to show up soon and plant a few veggies. Truth be told, I’m a better, happier person when I spend a good deal of my time with people who only exist because I made them up. With two series going, I should be really happy –so far, so good!