Why I Write Crime Fiction

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The best thing about writing crime fiction (mysteries and thrillers) is the endless font of ideas. Thieves are at work (the Louvre!), scams are abundant, surveillance is creepy, shenanigans run rampant. The damage people can do to each other and themselves seems endless. Writing my new destination thriller She Knew Too Much, I was able to take advantage of a number of societal aberrations: murder, theft, scamming of a high order, kidnapping, fake identity, weaknesses in the law enforcement establishment, and more. It takes place in Rome, which means the mafia can be part of the picture, along with Italy’s Byzantine law enforcement structure.

One of the greatest advantages an author has in putting together a mystery/thriller is that these stories typically deal with people who are at one of the most consequential times of their lives. There’s emotional intensity, fear and frustration. Risk. Drama. People are not necessarily at their best—or maybe they are. They learn things about their community, friends, family, partners, and themselves which sometimes they’d rather not know. It’s a time in their lives when what they do really matters. An important challenge for writers is to make the stakes matter to readers too.

A lot of writers play it safe and rely on worn-out plotlines. I read and review about 50 new crime/mystery/thriller books a year, and many of them still rely on genre clichés. Writers need to come up with something fresher than serial killers, gaslighting spouses, reunions of old friends where the secrets finally come out, and morally weary detectives with a divorce and a drinking problem. The ease with which an author can get sucked into those overdone plots is one of the cons.

Mystery stories are very popular (pro), so writers have to get their facts right—weapons, police procedure, geography and so on—which takes research (a con for some authors). Factual errors make a story lose credibility. At the same time, the author isn’t writing a textbook. No reader enjoys a big indigestible information dump. (The worst example I can think of was an author’s description of a weapon in which he used actual bullet points—not the shooting kind, the PowerPoint kind.) Recognizing the truly necessary details and artfully weaving them into the story is another of the writer’s challenges.

The need for research isn’t a con for me. Research is part of my process, and it always gives me ideas I would never have otherwise. In She Knew Too Much, I identified a small suburban town north of Rome where a gang member could hide. I found out (map research and street camera) that the town I’d chosen has a farmer’s market on Saturdays. Having the gang member visit that market, in full view of the street camera, became part of the story.

Another pro-might-be-con is the ubiquity of cell phones, street cameras (in some places), and information technology. Some stories or TV mysteries could be solved and trouble avoided if characters would just make a phone call. Perhaps this explains the popularity of setting stories a few decades—even centuries—ago. It avoids the technology complication but opens up significant new research challenges. Genie Clarke, the main character in She Knew Too Much, has to go completely off social media to keep the gangsters from tracking her. As a travel blogger with an active online presence, she feels even more disconnected from her usual world.

That’s her environment, and that’s part of the story. You can order it here from:
Bookshop.org
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

Who’s In Charge Here?

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For the blog tour I’m doing in connection with publication of my new thriller, She Knew Too Much, one of the bloggers asked an intriguing question. Do I ever feel like my characters are taking over or that I’m always in charge?

People do talk about characters taking the reins of the story and steering it off into unexpected directions, but I’d never thought about that actually happening in my writing. Reflecting on the question, though, I realized that may be partly a result of the way I work. I’m what they call a “pantser,” which means I write by the seat of my pants. I let the story grow organically, rather than plotting everything out in advance and channeling my characters into predetermined actions and results. Even though characters come out of my own head and you might think I’m directing the action like a puppeteer, in fact, for the characters to be realistic, at times they have to do something unexpected. Unexpected, even by me—in the sense of “unplanned.”

A good example is the relationship between the two main characters in She Knew Too Much—an American travel writer named Genie Clarke who gets into trouble in Rome and a Polizia di Stato Detective, Leo Angelini. Leo and Genie are obviously attracted to each other, but will they get together? I didn’t decide that beforehand, I let them work it out. They were both so preoccupied with keeping Genie safe from the mafiosi pursuing her and stopping the plot the mafia is trying to hatch, a relationship between them was never a slam-dunk. As in real life, a lot can interfere.

My approach is to develop the characters and, when they are thrust into a situation, I ask myself, “what would a person like this, with their unique attributes, do in these circumstances?” In fact, the ways they surprise me are one of the joys of writing!

It takes a bit of writing to get to know my characters well enough to understand how they would behave in certain situations. I couldn’t possibly know that beforehand. Then the job is to set up believable scenarios that let them be who they are, for better or worse.

In She Knew Too Much, several characters do the worst possible thing or come to the worst possible conclusions at every turn, sometimes to humorous effect. These hapless people are fun to write too!

I can’t say enough about how much I appreciate the welcoming blog hosts and the early reviewers of She Knew Too Much. The book is available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere.

Meet Amit Madoor . . .

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When reading my new novel She Knew Too Much for the umpteenth time–not as a Word document this time, but as a “real book” for proofreading–I was struck again by how much I liked not just the main characters, but also the secondary ones.

One of my favorites has always been Amit Madoor, the mafia’s Moroccan fence. He has a way of getting top dollar for stolen goods, and I was so fascinated by how his career might have started, I wrote far too much! I took out the passages not essential to the novel and turned them into a standalone short story, with its own arc and resolution, which takes place almost thirty years before the novel.

It involves a case that has always fascinated me–the still (in real life) unsolved robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The precious artworks stolen constitute the largest property theft in history, and they have never been recovered. Experts say that stealing artworks is child’s play next to trying to dispose of them afterward. That’s where Madoor excels.

In my short story, “Above Suspicion,” published in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, I hewed carefully to the exact details of the crime. Of course, I invented the thieves, but I think my theory about who they might have been and why they’ve never been caught holds up. You can read it here!

Meanwhile, to learn about Amit Madoor’s vital role in the plot threatening American travel writer Genie Clarke, read She Knew Too Much, available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other notable booksellers. The novel takes place in Rome, where Madoor now lives, and involves a handsome Italian police detective and a whole cast of intriguing characters.

Meet Oliver Harmon . . .

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Oliver Harmon, a secondary character in my new Italy-based thriller She Knew Too Much, was particularly fun to write. A well-meaning Anglican priest, he’s vitally important in the first chapter when he interrupts a violent attack on Genie Clarke, the novel’s main character. From there on, he appears intermittently, but again is crucial in the climax.

What I enjoyed about writing him is he’s one of those people—and we all have known someone like this—who talks on and on, with only the slenderest connection between topics. He’s a walking run-on sentence. Yet, he’s also a particular friend of the second-most important character in the story, Leo Angelini, chief detective of Rome’s Polizia di Stato.

Writers are challenged to make their characters both interesting and believable. Real people, not cardboard cutouts. For Harmon, I tried to think what the preoccupations would be of someone like that, transplanted from his home country, who’s a not-perfect fit with his superiors, someone whose parishioners might find a wee bit tiresome, but good-hearted at the core. Genie actually find him quite entertaining, and she needs the kind of lift to the spirits he provides as she goes up against some of the most dangerous criminals in the city.

If you’d like to read a bit more about Oliver Harmon—more than you’ll actually even find in the book, you can find the story here.

She Knew Too Much will be published February 15, and is available for preorder on Amazon now. Enjoy them both!

Vicarious Adventures for the Snowbound

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If the impulse to hibernate becomes just too strong over the next two weeks, here are two adventures stories that will get that sluggish body moving again—of course, you’ll have to occupy a chair to read them.

Come and Get Her by Bruce Conord

I raced through the pages of Bruce Conord’s new suspense thriller Come and Get Her to find out what deadly hazard would our hero, Jesse Arroyo, face next and whether he’d finally take one risk too many. His first-person story starts with a gripper. Jesse says it’s “the call that no parent should receive.” In the middle of the night, his ex-girlfriend Debi is on the phone telling him their daughter Sheri is missing. She and two friends crossed the Texas border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to visit a night club. Leaving late, they were kidnapped, but one of the girls escaped and gave the police in Laredo, Texas, the sketchy details.

Sheri was the result of a one-night stand some twenty years earlier, and a longer-term relationship between Jesse and Debi proved impossible: too much social distance. Jesse joined the Army, buried himself in Afghanistan and the clandestine services for the better part of two decades, and communication between him and Debi is rare.

The Laredo police and the FBI are upbeat about Sheri’s safety and confident of the cooperation of the Nuevo Laredo authorities. They are sure a ransom demand will come, and if the family pays it, which of course Debi’s wealthy father will, Sheri will be set free. Jesse is far less optimistic. Nuevo Laredo is wracked by drug cartel violence, and two blonde Americans are prime targets for trafficking. He’s not counting on help from the Mexican police, who are too often in cahoots with the cartels. Just as bad, he doesn’t trust Debi’s dad to pay up.

Conord writes convincingly about the effects on Jesse of twenty years’ operating in a hostile environment where trust was scant on the ground, unlike regrets, which were plentiful. When Jesse goes after Sheri himself, you know this is a long-shot endeavor, even for someone with his skills and savvy.

Unlike Don Winslow’s The Cartel and The Border, the book doesn’t tackle head-on the problems created by the drugs, guns, and money sloshing back and forth across the US-Mexican border. Yet, that reality is here and makes the story feel all-too-real. That impression is aided by Conord’s portrayal of the intransigent attitudes and tactics of US immigration and border patrol personnel. The action is non-stop, and the frustrations baked into the system are acute, so that, by the last page, you may feel you need a long winter’s nap. Exciting!

The Hunted by Steven Max Russo

Another nail-biting adventure is the new thriller The Hunted by Steven Max Russo. I’ve liked his previous books, The Debt Collector and The Dead Don’t Sleep for his engaging characters and clever plots. The Hunted does not disappoint.

Ophelia Harris, a former CIA analyst working in Afghanistan for the private security firm GSG (think Blackwater), was the only survivor of an operation that went south in Afghanistan. She escaped with, worth mentioning, two suitcases stuffed with cash. What she learned before the shooting started was that the Americans were being ambushed, something only someone on the inside at the company could have engineered. Because she escaped, she knows the suspicions point to her, and she’s on the run.

Because GSG is a security operation and has an inside track with military and espionage agencies, it has the resources to find her, wherever she hides. And has. First in Florida and now, as the story opens, in New Jersey. What the company’s leaders also have is motivation, not just because they suspect her of betraying her team, but also because, unbeknownst to Ophelia, one of the Americans killed in the operation was the boss’s son.

A chance meeting of someone from Afghanistan leads to an uneasy partnership in which Ophelia and former Army Ranger Austin Medford flee across Pennsylvania. The head of GSG and two of his crack assassins are hard on their heels. The fugitives have skill and nerve on their side, while their antagonists have all that, plus virtually unlimited access to surveillance technology. It’s a crackerjack story that like Come and Get Her, leaves you breathless.

My new thriller, She Knew Too Much, is on sale now (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). An American travel writer on assignment in Rome stumbles on deadly information.

Jenny Kidd by Laury A. Egan

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Need to escape from this gloomy January weather? How about a vacation in sunny Italy—Venice to be exact. In her new book, Jenny Kidd, author Laury A. Egan recreates La Serenissima so believably, you’ll be surprised when you look up from her pages and discover it’s still the middle of winter!

Jenny is visiting Venice in order to pursue her desire to become painter and, it’s fair to say, to escape her overbearing father in America. Though she’s twenty-five, he’s convinced she shouldn’t be so far away, unsupervised, much less pursuing a career in the arts that is most likely to come to nothing. So he believes. And tells her, repeatedly.

At a gallery visit, she meets another young woman with an odd British accent and sketchy details, Randi Carroll. Randi is congenial but overly familiar—flirtatious actually—and tells Jenny about a costume party planned for that evening. The parties are held once a month at the palazzo of the wealthy Barbon family. Jenny decides to go, rents a costume, and it’s an unsettling, lavishly described event.

The guests don’t remove their masks, and she can’t tell if she’s dancing with a man or a woman. Having too many drinks doesn’t help. She does dance with one unmasked person, a beautiful woman wearing a distinctive rose-colored satin gown. Dancing with her is surprisingly sexy. This reaction, after the flirtatiousness of Randi unsettle Jenny.

In a day or two, she has occasion to meet the costume party hosts, Caterina Barbon and her younger brother, Sebatiano. Caterina is exceptionally beautiful, and she and Jenny agree she should paint Caterina’s portrait. To her delight, it’s turning out quite well. Through Caterina’s many connections, Jenny meets a Venetian art dealer who wants to see more of her work. Her excitement over these promising new friendships and career developments—and her determination to not give in to her father’s worldview—outweigh what, in other circumstances, might be natural caution. In fact, she ignores the warning signs: her flat has been robbed and, much worse, the delectable woman in the rose satin gown has turned up dead, floating in the lagoon.

You may think Jenny’s father’s judgment is not so off-base when she takes up residence with the seductive and aristocratic Barbon siblings, who turn out to be pansexual. Surprising herself, she and Caterina begin a relationship, and it isn’t until she realizes she cannot leave the house—bars on the windows, locked doors, that her suspicions start to grow. From there on, the book takes on a heightened emotional intensity and unexpected twists that will leave you breathless.

The sexual energy in Egan’s work is undeniable. And she’s not afraid to include characters who are complex and diverse. I’ve read four of her books and find that she doesn’t add a particular trait because it might be trendy, her characters are fully rounded.

And, I note that the cover of the first of her thrillers I read, The Psychologist’s Shadow, featured several elaborate Venetian carnival masks. Thinking about these four books, the idea of masks is a very apt theme for her work. You’ll be hoping Jenny can see behind them in time.

Holiday Theater Treat

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Radio station WBFR, Christmas Eve, 1946. Cast and crew assemble for a live broadcast of It’s a Wonderful Life. As they present this holiday classic “on air,” the audience at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey is treated to the familiar story, as well as the interplay of the actors and technician producing the radio drama. Directed by Paul Mullins from an adaptation by Joe Landry, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play opened December 6 and is on stage through December 28. It’s is a heart-warming delight at multiple levels.

The small cast moves swiftly from portraying one character to another, yet the strong storyline is never lost and retains every bit of its emotional punch. The small town of Bedford Falls, N.Y., is again at risk of being taken over by grasping, heartless Mr. Potter (played by RJ Foster, who is also the station announcer, among other roles), and George Bailey (Tony Roach) seems the only person standing between Potter and success. When the situation becomes too dire, the angel Clarence (Andy Paterson) is sent from heaven to show George the way out, reuniting him with his wife Mary (Tiffany Topol), children, and the townspeople who love him. Topol also enacts George and Mary’s newborn babies’ cries with stunning verisimilitude. Tina Stafford’s comedy sense sparkles in a variety of roles, including the vamp Violet, George’s mother, and the Italian saloon-owner and accordionist Mr. Martini. Finally, one of the joys of the radio play setting is seeing the Foley artist at work, creating the sounds of ringing bells, closing doors, wind storms, and broken windows. That part is played by Paul Henry, who also is George’s absent-minded Uncle Billy.

The lighted signs—“Stand By” and “On Air”—add to the realism, and the audience gladly cooperated with the “Applause” cue. But just because you’re in a theater doesn’t mean you’re spared commercial breaks. The cast’s crooning about hair tonic and soap generated considerable audience merriment.

The director smoothly moves the cast from microphone to the sidelines, to the piano, and back and forth, so that even though the lines are mostly delivered by actors standing in front of a mic, the play never loses momentum. The STNJ audience loved it, and you will too!

STNJ productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

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I’ve missed a few posts lately because I’ve been creating an index for my family history. How detailed? What’s most helpful? These are questions I don’t have the answers to. Having studied family histories other people have assembled, I know an index is invaluable, and the best I can do may be to strike a middle ground between obsession and gloss. Future users will have to rate my success, though I probably won’t hear about it.

But I do want to tell you about a book I really enjoyed, Lori Roy’s The Final Episode. It’s one of a string of books that enter meta-territory, in a way, in that they’re about television, its coverage of true-crime and the impact of that on people involved in the original tragedy. Others in this string that I’ve reviewed are The Murder Show by Matt Goldman, Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker, and one of the best, The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave. Each interesting in its own way and each highlighting significant downsides to the genre.

I can’t always pinpoint why one story totally captures my attention and another doesn’t. It’s some ineffable yet powerful characteristic that goes beyond plot, character, and setting. For whatever reason (reasons?), The Final Episode, kept me spellbound.

Roy provides a great set-up—a true crime television series is reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance of Francie Farrow, taken from her Florida bedroom some twenty years earlier. It happened during a sleepover with twelve-year-old Nora Banks. Feigning sleep, Nora saw and heard the man who took Francie and threaten to take her to the nearby Florida swamp.

Three families’ futures and fates are entangled in this devastating crime. For Francie’s parents, the slow-moving investigation and not knowing what happened to their daughter, where she is, whether she’s alive is, in the long run, more corrosive than the worst possible news.

The neighborhood becomes a pressure-cooker, and Nora and her parents escape to her mother’s childhood home on the fringe of the Big Cypress Swamp, with its venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, bears, bobcats, and cougars.

There, Nora’s family find the protagonist of the story, almost-eleven-year-old Jennifer Jones. Jenny and her two best friends are simultaneously lured by the swamp and obsessed by its terrors. Every girl in South Florida knows about Francie Farrow—the posters and news coverage are unavoidable—and learning that Nora has an intimate knowledge of the event makes her friendship all the more alluring and destabilizing. The disastrous season trudges on—hot, humid, reeking of swamp smells, and plagued by insects. Worse is the maelstrom of accusations, revelations, and manipulations that the families endure. At the end of the summer, another kidnapping occurs, and everything is changed for them all.

The story of the girls’ explorations and their evolving relationships is backdrop to the story of the grown-up Jenny, trying to make a living, out of touch with her childhood friends. But now that the television series is airing, the heartbreaks of that summer are uppermost in the minds of everyone, including Francie Farrow’s poor mother Beverley, increasingly unhinged. With the television series lurching toward a conclusion, no one knows how it will end. Will it reveal what really happened to Francie, and who will be blamed for it?

Author Roy keeps the girls well plugged into the plot. As they go about conditioning their hair and painting their nails, their actions are not only realistic, but to a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious. The male characters are well developed too, including the police officers and FBI agents, the fathers of Francie, Jenny, and Nora, and the adult Jenny’s sometime-boyfriend, Arlen (who has his secrets too). I particularly enjoyed Jenny’s aging grandmother, Dehlia, who never loses faith in her family, her history, and her portents. A real page-turner!

You’ll receive my “best of the best” recommendations for books, tv, movies, travel (sometimes), and publishing news in my mercifully short quarterly newsletter. Sign up with this link (you’ll be sent an email; be sure to confirm). Enjoy!

It’s Not Easy Being a Spy

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While some terrific espionage thrillers have been written in the last couple of years (see list below), spying in the 21st c. is not what it once was. First of all, it’s less Agents Running in the Field, the title of one of John le Carré’s late novels and more Analysts Staring at a Computer Screen. To use the intelligence field jargon, more “communications intelligence” and less “human intelligence,” Comint versus Humint.

Further, it’s almost impossible to stay hidden these days, with the proliferation of cameras, facial recognition, gait analysis (Keyser Söze, I’m looking at you), DNA, and AI document analyses. We watched the new movie Mastermind with Josh O’Connor last weekend, a story about an art heist that takes place in 1970, and I kept noticing all the ways in which a crime like that couldn’t happen today. Yeah, I know, tell it to the Louvre. Let’s just say it couldn’t be carried out in the same way. Of course, even in 1970, the Mastermind DID get caught, but that was through the time-honored technique of getting one of the criminals to rat out the others.

Le Carré made stories set in the old Soviet Union into an art form, and many people, me among them, lamented the loss of that old, familiar fictional antagonism. He had to reach far afield for new topics, as in The Night Manager, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener. Well, the world turns and the Russians are back. But during the 90s, the sense that the familiar enemy had evaporated blinded our leaders to the strengthening Al Qaeda.

After 9/11, they got it. And the professionals realized how deficient their assets were. It was disturbingly parallel to the situation at the beginning of the Cold War. Then we didn’t know much about the Soviets, what they were likely to do and whether they had the capacity to do it. In both instances, desperation for information led to torture. And more recently, to the disembodied terror of drone strikes, with the inevitably inexact targeting.

Most recently, the elimination of DEI programs has been especially calamitous for CIA. After years of trying to recruit Asian Americans, African Americans, and Arab Americans who can blend into countries and population groups where whites simply cannot, we’ve deliberately blinded ourselves. We need to know what’s going on in some of these countries, and now we won’t. If you want to read more about the travails of CIA over the years and its current challenges, try The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. Despite all these complications, authors continue to write award-winning espionage novels.

For great spy fiction, try:
The Translator by Harriet Crawley. A Russian translator must escape Moscow, but she knows too much.
The Protocols of Spying by Merle Nygate. Israeli security forces based in London, reeling after the Hamas attack, walk a tightrope.
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry. An American spy, working in Bahrain, takes on a final mission that goes badly awry.
The Tiger and the Bear by Philip Lazar. Journalists with a potentially explosive story must dig deep to find out if it’s true.
Moscow X or The Seventh Floor or, really, anything by David McCloskey.

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A Bag Full of Stones – by A. Molotkov

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In one of those crime stories that you hope isn’t based on real-life events, but expect it could be, A Molotkov’s new novel explores what might happen when a person whose mental faculties are teetering at the edge of chaos is exposed to an unrelenting stream of vitriol. Especially fear and loathing aimed at people who are perceived to be enemies. Right now, not only in the United States, it seems that the conditions for the kinds of crimes Molotkov has envisioned in fiction simmer barely below the surface in reality.

In this novel, set in Portland, Oregon, in 2019, a volatile mix of identity politics has created an environment where one man feels morally bound to take corrective action. He even refers to himself as The Corrector. He’s a weak vessel to effect social change, however, and on a steeply downward spiral. He drinks too much bourbon. He lives with his mother, who is dying in a hospital bed in their living room, and he’s haunted by the insults his dead father directed at him. He has no friends. His antagonisms cost him his job. What he has been successful at is murder.

As the story opens, police detectives Brenda Smith and Dmitry Volkov are investigating the death of an elderly Yemeni engineer. A plain red business-sized card found on the body indicates that his death may be linked to the murder of a South Asian woman a year earlier. Within days, a third victim—this time an American nurse who is Muslim—is found, bearing the same red calling card. Conditions are ripe for citywide panic.

The detectives are not without complicated, distracting lives themselves. Volkov is deep in gambling debt; Smith is starting a new relationship, which may be doomed when her partner learns she’s a cop. Each character’s story is told in short snippets, sometimes only a page or two, which for me became rather disjointed. Yet, it’s a practical way to handle such a large cast of characters—the two cops, the Corrector, and the victims, living and dead. Yes, in this story, the dead withdraw only gradually from the world of the living and continue for a time to have thoughts and observations. The thoughts of the murdered Yemeni engineer and the nurse focus on bringing their murderer to justice. When Detective Smith has a flash of intuition about the case, now and again, perhaps the dead’s messages are reaching their target. How often must real-life detectives wish the victims in their investigations could talk to them!

Anti-immigrant sentiment, uncontrolled gambling, complicated relationships—that’s a lot to tackle, but Molotkov isn’t through. The mixed emotions and difficulties the Corrector faces in caring for his dying mother are a commentary on a further dysfunctional aspect of American life: the health care system. To the good, the mother is enrolled in hospice, and a nurse comes to check on her every few days, equipment has been brought in, and her pain appears to be managed. At the same time, the deteriorating home environment and the instability of her sole caregiver (her drunken son) should be obvious to any health professional. In one of the most moving scenes in the story, the Corrector tells his mother about his murders, expecting her to be proud of him. Instead, she is clearly horrified, yet helpless to do anything about it. She never speaks to him again.

The depth of character development in this crime story make it a stand-out. Termed a “literary crime story,” A Bag Full of Stones and its unvarnished appraisal of the tragedies latent in the current political moment provide a great deal to think about.