***Betty Fedora – “Crime Fiction for Kickass Women”

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Betty Fedora

It’s always delightful to find a new publisher of short fiction in the crime genre. I just read Issue Two of Betty Fedora, tagged “Kickass Women in Crime Fiction.” What’s not to like? The nine stories in this issue, selected by editor Kristen Valentine, cover a wide range of criminal activity—preventing it, investigating it, perpetrating it. Five of the nine are by women authors, too.

The first story in Issue 2 is by Montreal-based screenwriter Shane Simmons. His “Heads Will Roll,” is a story about whose title you could say “literally” and be correct. Colleen Quinn’s “Lucifer” takes a look back at an unhappy upbringing, and the difficulty of escaping it. London-based Lara Alonso Carona’s “A Diet Rich in Noir” combines the investigatory talent and family sparring skills of police detective Regan Monroe and her 19-year-old daughter Kat, a licensed private detective (first in a series of news flashes for mom). Clever.

I laughed out loud at John H. Dromey’s “Burden of Proof.” He has a woman judge, prosecutor, and witness running rings around a purse-snatcher and his male defense lawyer. At one point, the judge says to the defense attorney, “(I) wonder if you haven’t already decided you cannot win this case on its merits, so now you’re laying the groundwork for an appeal based on incompetent representation.”

I met New Jersey-based Al Tucher when he served on a panel of authors discussing why they pick faraway and exotic settings for their stories. At the time, he said he was planning a series set in Hawai`i, and here in Betty Fedora is “Luxury to Die For,” one of the results of that plan. An interview with Al is on the Betty Fedora home page.

If you like crime stories—and kickass women—and not necessarily in that order, you may want to snag a copy. I ordered mine from Amazon.

Hello, My Name is Doris

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Sally Field, Max Greenfield, Hello My Name Is DorisThe capsule assessment of this Michael Showalter film (trailer) starring Sally Field, has it exactly right: see it for Field’s outstanding performance though much of the rest drifts toward the unexceptional.

Its story of an aging woman—a wallflower and a hoarder—who falls for a much younger, hipper man, embraces the standard Hollywoodish dichotomy between hopes and realities. That dynamic isn’t confined to the June-November romance, it also characterizes the play’s more serious side, the family pressure on Doris to clean out the house she and her mother lived in and move somewhere smaller and more manageable.

The young man, John Fremont, is played amiably by Max Greenfield, and Tyne Daly is Doris’s long-time loyal friend Roz. Peter Gallagher is convincingly smarmy as a self-help guru.

Some of the best moments come as Doris struggles to bridge the generation gap. When Roz’s 13-year-old granddaughter (played charmingly by Isabella Acres) introduces her to Facebook, Doris finds the path to inside information about John. She pretends to be a fan of his favorite technopop band—Baby Goya and the Nuclear Winters—and they end up at a concert together. Doris’s interactions with Baby Goya (Jack Antonoff) and his mates are hilarious.

In the situations with twenty-somethings, Doris sticks out not just because of her age, but because she is a true original. She sticks out everywhere. Nevertheless, for a while, anyway, it seems as if the decades between 1975 and 2015 whirled past her and the younger generation has now come back around to where she’s happening again.

In short: Field is great and the rest is harmless—“a simple, delightful little human comedy. You know, like life itself,” said Tulsa World reviewer Michael Smith.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences: 95%.

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***The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra

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Ganesha, India, elephant

(photo: Swaminathan, creative commons license)

By Vaseem Khan – Though this debut crime fiction author was born in London, his experience working in the Indian subcontinent comes through clearly in his convincing portrayal of the people, culture, and politics of the complicated city of Mumbai. He’s managed to marry that deep knowledge with his more recent work experience as well. Since returning to the U.K. in 2006, he has worked in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London.

If it’s possible to have a “gentle” crime novel, this is one, although the crimes he writes about are wicked, indeed, involving trafficking of young boys, murder, assault and that persistent and almost universal social disease, corruption. Our hero is 51-year-old police inspector Ashwin Chopra, who has been forced into an unwelcome early retirement by a heart attack. Just at that time, two unusual events occur.

First, he hears the laments of a poor woman who claims that because her family has no status, the police will not investigate the death of her son, which they claim was accidental and which she says was murder.

Second is receipt of the bizarre inheritance that gives the book its title—a baby elephant. The accompanying note warns Chopra “this is no ordinary elephant.” Indeed.

At home, he’s at loose ends. His wife Poppy worries about his health and wants to keep him close, but that would mean also being close to his amusingly sour mother-in-law. These family relations are charmingly told, tongue in cheek. In fact, the light and witty tone of the book is reminiscent of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series and Tarquin Hall’s tales about Punjabi Vish Puri, “India’s Most Private Investigator.”

The reader can’t take seriously that Chopra tails a suspect accompanied by baby elephant Ganesha, or that the elephant manages to save Chopra’s life. I don’t believe Khan expects readers to be that literal. Instead, his easy prose encourages us to relax into a foreign, sensuous environment where even the worst bad guys are likely to get what’s coming to them. I had a few plot quibbles, but these can be glossed over in light of Khan’s many other accomplishments. It’s a crime story perfect for readers who don’t require nonstop violence. I’m delighted there’s more to come in this series!

A longer version of this review appeared at CrimeFictionLover.com.

****The Short Drop

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noose

(photo: Petri Damstén, creative commons license)

By Matthew FitzSimmons, narrated by James Patrick Cronin – In this fast-paced thriller, 28-year-old Gibson Vaughn is drawn into a renewed effort to solve the decade-old disappearance of a childhood friend, fourteen-year-old Suzanne Lombard. She was the daughter of prominent political figure and now presidential candidate Benjamin Lombard, and the impending tenth anniversary of when she went missing is bringing up painful memories.

As a teenager, Gibson hacked into Ben Lombard’s computers in an attempted campaign financing expose and traded a potential prison sentence for a stint in the Marines. Now he’s home and having difficulty finding work. Despite his skills, he carries too much baggage.

George Abe, Lombard’s former chief of security—a man Gibson has every reason not to trust—dangles the possibility Suzanne is alive or at least that they can finally learn her fate. He ensures Gibson’s participation with the one statement he knows will be irresistible: Suzanne loved you better than anyone.

Abe shows Gibson clever new electronic evidence that has surfaced, and with two members of Abe’s team, Gibson sets out to track it down. They end up in Somerset, Pennsylvania, on the trail of another hacker who stays one step ahead.

The timing couldn’t be worse, with Ben Lombard—whom Richard Lipez in The Washington Post calls the book’s “least interesting character”—about to be picked as his party’s presidential nominee. Would resurrecting Suzanne’s case influence the election? Would it garner Lombard the sympathy vote? A lot is at stake, and the political players are ruthless. Among the people trying to stop Gibson and crew are a sociopath who makes one mistake with shoes and the kind of political junkie only Washington can breed.

Gibson is an engaging protagonist, and, as Lipez says, “One of FitzSimmons’s many skills is making the ins and outs of Internet technology more or less comprehensible for techno-klutzy readers, a true public service.”

A debut novelist, FitzSimmons has handled his complex plot deftly, and although there are numerous characters, the excellence of Cronin’s reading kept them all straight for me. This was both an Amazon and a GoodReads Best Book of December 2015. Oh, and “the short drop”? You probably don’t want to know what that is.

Your Website’s “About Me” Page

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house, Texas

(photo: Carol Von Canon, creative commons license)

Just in time for a spring spruce-up of your web home, my favorite book marketing guru Sandra Beckwith posted a how-to on upgrading the “About Me” page. On this website, the page is called “Who Is?”—a faint echo of the mystery theme (perhaps should be “Whodunnit?”). The post was written by serial entrepreneur Andrew Wise whose online success means his advice is worth listening to, and it’s of interest to all authors maintaining a web site or thinking about starting one.

The biggest reason not to “create and forget” this page is that our visitors read it. In fact, says Wise, it’s usually one of the 10 most popular pages on a site. I was surprised to learn that’s true of my site, too. New visitors want to know we’re reliable—regardless of what kind of stuff we write. He’s distilled a lot of insight into this infographic (click on it for a larger view).

At a minimum, the About Me page should:

  • Prove yourself to be an authority in your field – a bit of a stretch for me, since I write about crime and am not a former cop or lawyer. But, my publication credentials speak to a different aspect of credibility, and they’re on another page altogether, my “Writing . . .” page. Hmmmm.
  • Show your personality – make your text more of a conversation and less of an information dump; be positive and friendly.
  • Include a picture of yourself – this responds to the human love of visual images. My page has only a thematic picture.
  • At the conclusion, provide a way for readers to be in touch. I do that! But that area need tweaking. The ask is buried.

As blogger Rob Orr reminds us, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” In reviewing many About Me pages, he says the most important common denominator of the best ones is that they make a connection. In that sense, they are less about the author than about the visitors, a point many others make as well. How to translate that insight from commercial sites to the writer-reader experience is something I’ll be thinking about.

If you were coming to my website the first time, what would you want to know about me? Anything? Are you finding it? Come back in a month to find out “Who Is? 2.0”!

Polishing Your Instrument: Your Voice

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microphone

(photo: Pete on Flickr, public domain)

Last Friday actor and writer Alex Adams led an informal seminar for local writers on reading their fiction aloud, effectively and entertainingly. He described ways to create meaningful vocal variety and illustrated his points with excerpts of recordings created for “Selected Shorts.” As an avid reader of audiobooks, I appreciate how much a reader contributes to the impact of a tale.

Alex writes specifically for live audiences and regularly presents his stories and sketches in various venues in New York. As a member of the writing group I belong to, he helps us get ready for our own much less frequent public readings (see yesterday’s post about the benefits of reading your work out loud).

Over the years, he’s developed a method for marking up his copy that helps him achieve the most effective read. By practicing the marked-up copy numerous times, these vocal changes become as integral to the piece as punctuation. He suggested that authors mark up the copy they’re going to read to indicate:

  • Pauses. Alex uses a check mark in the places where a brief pause will allow a moment of dramatic tension, time for a joke to settle, or the chance to take a breath—you don’t want to run out of air!
  • Pacing. You may want to read some passages—for example, explanatory words and phrases—more quickly, and others—such as the introduction of an important new character—more slowly. “Change-of-pace” is synonymous with preventing monotony!
  • Emphasis. He underlines critical words and phrases one, two, or even three times to make sure he gives them the attention they need. You can emphasize words by rising volume or pitch or both.
  • Special attention. He circles words that are important, need very clear articulation, are easily misunderstood, or that give him trouble in practice. Taking the trouble to say a few words extra clearly helps it stick in the listener’s mind.
  • Dialog. While amateur readers don’t need to go overboard in trying to mimic various characters’ speech, some differentiation helps the listener know who’s speaking. Jessica Woodbury in Bookriot recently complained about audiobook readers (male) who pitch the female characters’ voices too high and make them all sound breathily the same. This is not only unnatural, she says, but “They become inferior characters in the telling of the story.” Alex edits his manuscript to look more like a play script so that, as he’s reading, he doesn’t lose track of which character is speaking.
  • Freestyle. Any additional annotations meaningful to yourself and the piece you’re reading.

Alex’s presentation made me think of audiobooks that exemplified his points. One is Herman Koch’s The Dinner, narrated by Clive Mantle, a story in which the first-person narrator is deeply jealous of his successful brother. Because of the way Mantle always carefully articulated the brother’s name—Serge Lohman—loathing just dripped off it.

Another good example (and another terrific book) was Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, narrated by Oliver Wyman. At first I thought the reader wasn’t doing much, but he grew on me, perfectly capturing the main character’s puzzlement, sadness, hope, fear. This book isn’t about a larger-than-life hero, it was Billy’s ordinariness that made it so heartbreaking.

In total contrast to these insightful narrations, imagine my bafflement when I listened to a post-recording interview with Ralph Cosham, audiobook reader of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries. He said he likes to discover her books along with the listener. As a result, he never reads them before sitting down in the recording studio! Totally winging it may work for him, but the rest of us have to practice in order to mine the rich possibilities inherent in our own voices.

9 Keys to a Successful Reading

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road sign, rough road

(copyright Elvis Kennedy, creative commons license)

Reading your own work aloud—even without an audience—is a helpful exercise for any writer. The sentences that seem to flow so smoothly across the page will reveal themselves to be scarred with rough patches, poor word choices like potholes, and cracks in logic.

Members of my writing group do a public reading twice a year. Not only does preparation for the reading improve the writing, the audience feedback is strongly energizing (since so often, submissions to agents and publishers evoke no feedback at all).

An audience isn’t necessary for diagnostic work; you can read a draft aloud at any stage it’s in. But if you have the chance to do a public reading, the route to success is simple: practice! The more run-throughs you do, the greater your confidence and the smoother your performance.

Key hints are:

  1. Lighting: If you’re over 40, you may need extra light. Maybe you’re thinking, I’ll use my laptop, no problem. Consider whether the laptop screen not only casts an unflatteringly cold light on you, but also sets up a perceived barrier between you and your audience. You may decide old-school is better.
  2. If you use paper, print your manuscript in a BIG font. The less light you have, the bigger your font should be. I generally print mine in 20-point BOLD, after an embarrassing episode when I couldn’t see what I was reading.
  3. Be sure you understand time constraints, and when you practice, time yourself. If you consistently bump up against your time limit, cut something. You don’t want to notice the clock and start rushing.
  4. Stand up when you practice. Even if you’re offered a chair at your reading, you’re better off on your feet. Your voice will carry farther and your breathing will improve.
  5. Plant your feet firmly, a little apart to prevent weaving (you don’t want your audience to get seasick), and use natural hand gestures. Practice them, too.
  6. Whenever you stumble over a word, circle it, so you know it’s coming and can anticipate it. If a word or phrase is too much of a tongue-twister, or you consistently read it wrong, consider changing it.
  7. Mark up your copy to indicate variations in intonation, speed, emphasis. If your piece has dialog, differentiate the voices.
  8. On performance day, have a small bottle of water handy.
  9. Smile and make eye contact!

If you’re like me and tend to yawn while reading aloud, you may need more oxygen. You probably won’t have the problem if you read standing up. I don’t. And you might also want to take a few deep breaths before you start!

Tomorrow: Polishing Your Instrument–Your Voice for a public reading.

****The Empty Quarter

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desert, man in desert

(photo: Ilker Ender, creative commons license)

By David L. Robbins –What an exciting adventure combining military and medical thriller elements! It takes place in the Rub’ al-Khali, the world’s largest desert (“the empty quarter”), which occupies most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. People are scarce there, except for the ones you most do not want to meet.

It’s a multiple point-of-view novel, told mostly from the perspectives of members of a U.S. Air Force pararescuemen (PJs) team. PJs’ combined military-medical mission is personnel recovery, and they use both conventional and unconventional combat rescue methods. The motto of this branch of service is “That Others May Live,” and Robbins effectively describes the team members’ dedication to that mission, despite their differences in personality and temperament.

We also read the point of view of Arif, a middle-aged Saudi man whose wife Nadya is a member of the Saudi royal family. Her father, Prince Hassan bin Abd al-Aziz is the country’s head of security. Arif has fallen out with his father-in-law, and he and Nadya are in hiding in the tiny Yemeni town of Ma’rib. Robbins portrays their mutual devotion quite movingly.

A third key point of view is that of Josh Cofield, a former Army Ranger, assigned to the American Embassy in the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Everyone, the ambassador included, erroneously believes Josh is CIA, because he is “awkward as a diplomat,” a bit of a bull in a china shop, but a skilled speaker of Arabic.

When an attempt is made on Prince Aziz’s life, he mistakenly blames the exiled Arif. He wants his son-in-law dead and his daughter returned to him, and he wants U.S. help in achieving these goals He cannot get it, however, unless an American life is threatened. A plan begins to take shape in diabolical minds.

A wild nighttime chase across the desert occupies the last half of the book. Part of Robbins’s skill is in avoiding making any of the principal players obvious bad guys. They’re complex characters with conflicting goals, and all doing their best to resolve an impossible situation.

I appreciated that the book includes helpful maps. Not as helpful—and something readers are bound to object to—is the frequent use of military abbreviations and acronyms. While Robbins defines a few of these in footnotes, it might have been better to have a list in an appendix  or to retain the abbreviations in speech, but not rely on them as much in the narrative. It would be a shame if readers abandoned a top-notch tale because of the resulting confusion. Robbins has 10 other novels under his body armor. I’ll be reading more of them!

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

***Devil in the Grass

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alligator

(photo: heymeadow, creative commons license)

By Christopher Bowron – This debut thriller is an ambitious mix of Florida politics, Satanic cults, Seminole tradition, and alligators. And a bull shark. Author Bowron is clearly familiar with the southwest Florida setting, which he describes expertly, bringing the story to vivid life.

The Florida Everglades is home to any number of dangerous predators, including humans of the sort who don’t mix well with civilization. The 9-foot tall sawgrass that gives the Everglades its nickname—River of Grass—provides Canadian author Bowron’s inspiration for the book title as well as superb cover for his characters as they ply their small boats through its waters.

The impetus for the plot is also grounded in real life: the ongoing political battle between those who want to save the Everglades as a unique and irreplaceable natural resource and the agricultural interests making vast fortunes growing sugar cane and raising cattle along its edges. In Devil in the Grass, former pro football player and half-Seminole Jackson Walker works as an intern for Republican State Senator, James Hunter, who supports Clean Water legislation. Walker, in his mid-20s, meets and falls for a woman working for the state Republican Party. She seeks him out, seduces him, and gradually exposes him to the Satanic cult called The Brotherhood of Set.

After a while, Walker does what he believes will be an innocent errand for the cult leader, and at the book’s opening we find him hiding out in Big Cypress Swamp, accused of slaying a man and woman in a Satanic ritual. Although he believes he’s being framed because of his work with the Senator, letting himself become soft and apathetic may have contributed. He regrets the demise of his football career and its heroes: “It was the fearlessness with which they marched onto the field that had mattered to him.” Inevitably, Walker will be called upon to demonstrate that same fearlessness before the book’s last page.

If the leaders of the Satanic cult weren’t creepy enough, they have for generations used a particular local family—the McFaddens—to be their clean-up crew. They are prone to torture and killing, and they let the vastness of the Everglades hide the evidence. I’m a little burned out on serial killers with chain saws, but the alligators make for heart-pounding excitement.

As the story gets rolling, not only the police, but also the Satanists and their instruments, the McFaddens, are after Walker. And don’t forget the gators.

The book clearly ends with the promise of a sequel, which I hope can make the bad guys as believable as the environment and that Bowron gets a little help with dialog. I’m not sure when this novel takes place, but if Buck Henderson’s “old Cadillac” was manufactured after 2002, it has a trunk release lever. And I ardently wish he hadn’t laid Jimmy McFadden’s psychotic behavior at the door of “severe autism.” Scientific study has failed to link the two.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

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Get Your Irish On

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Belfast, Writer's Square

Writer’s Square, Belfast (copyright, Albert Bridge; reused under creative commons license)

Ireland has produced so many familiar writers, from James Joyce and Oscar Wilde to more current classics, like Frank McCourt and Angela’s Ashes. For St. Patrick’s Day, Barnes & Noble assembled a short list of contemporary authors who keep the country’s storytelling traditions going. Here are three of theirs and two of mine:

  • Colm Tóibín – “a living link to Irish history,” from his grandfather’s arrest during the Easter Rising (its centenary is this year) to his father’s affiliation with the IRA. Best known to American audiences is his novel Brooklyn, made into a wonderful 2015 film, reviewed here.
  • Neil Jordan, novelist and screenwriter (known best for the 1992 movie, The Crying Game). “A clear, poetic style.”
  • Tana French, the award-winning “First Lady of Irish Crime” is a master of twisty plots with deep psychological resonance. I read her Broken Harbor in 2013, and especially admired her unforgettable depiction of a mentally unbalanced character.
  • Glenn Patterson, whose novel The International (review) has been called “The best book about the Troubles ever written,” and it isn’t about bloodshed and betrayal at all.
  • Adrian McKinty, who also writes about Belfast and its residents and expats, profiled here. Great humor. I’ve listened to three of them, and Gerard Doyle’s audio narration is sublime!

No blarney here!