Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Take-Aways

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In a post last week based in part on an interview with award-winning author Laura van den Berg, she talked about the strangeness we encounter in daily life. Some people may see mysteries in that strangeness, some see the workings of the supernatural, and some just pass right by, eyes glued to cell phone. Now that’s strange! The current Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine includes a number of stories that anticipate Halloween and the different ways people react to such hard-to-explain happenings.

Strangeness and ambiguity are useful tools in fiction, not just at Halloween. In real life, friendships may suddenly end, marriages dissolve, and we may not know why—even when we’re one of the principals. Conversely, the things that keep a relationship going can be equally puzzling.

To van den Berg, the ambiguity in a story can be either positive or negative. Even when a story doesn’t provide all the answers, she says, “it should give [readers] something to take away.” Inexperienced writers, trying to achieve a sense of mystery, may under-explain, running the risk of merely creating confusion and giving their readers nothing to latch onto. It’s equally off-putting when authors over-explain. Trust your readers to figure many things out. A friend used to write sentences like, “He threw the plate against the wall because he was angry.” Clearly, the “because” clause is completely unnecessary. “She spent an hour on her makeup because she wanted to look her best.” Ditto.

A story’s ending is an important contributor to what the reader will take from it. Van den Berg’s approach to finding the endings of her stories doesn’t sound like a huge assembly of 3 x 5 cards and post-its. Nor does she flail around trying to discover the ending in a morass of prose. Instead, she says she often sees the ending as “an image of some kind.” She may not initially see all the action steps (plot) that will get her there, but she’s moving toward it, through the fog of creation, following the glow of a distant light.

In the mystery/crime/thriller genre, an ending is likely to be unsatisfying if it leaves too many mysteries unsolved, too many loose ends. When I’m writing, I keep a list of unresolved story questions. They may be tangible issues such as, How does Evie know Carl has a peanut allergy? Or less tangible ones, like, If Steve really loves Diana, why did he have an affair?

I don’t have to work out an answer to them the moment they come up (an invitation to backstory that derails the flow), but when I arrive at the end, I check my list. Are all the questions that can be answered with a fact addressed in some logical and preferably unobtrusive way? Have the intangible questions at least been considered by the character? It isn’t necessary that readers completely believe a character’s explanations, but they should be confident the character believes them, at least at some level. A frequent and annoying cop-out is the phrase, “he had no choice but to . . .” following which the author steers the character into some plot-necessary action. Of course there were choices, and it is the writer who made one. Slightly better is when characters say, “I had no choice . . .” Yes, you recognize they’re probably just rationalizing. Weakly. Unpersuasively. Which of itself says something about them.

You may recall that one of the necessaries of a short story is “it needs to have a point.” That doesn’t mean a political point, or a hit-them-over-the-head-with-a-hammer point. It’s more subtle, something that grounds the stories despite and because of life’s mysteries. Irish author Anne Enright said it well, “Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.” You, the writer, are the rock in a sea of ambiguity.

Short Story Prowess: EQMM Sept-Oct 2024

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Last week’s post about what to look for in a short story received a lot of likes, and reading the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine offers the opportunity to put those insights to the test. And, the competition was fierce. Here’s what the panel of experts said they (and editors) look for in a good short story.

  1. It needs a point – Andrew Walsh-Huggins’s story, “Through Thick and Thin” is a testament to the wisdom in the old saying, “let the dead past bury its dead.” It’s also a reminder of a point you can’t help but notice nearly every time you watch a television mystery show: If people didn’t keep secrets, they’d have a lot fewer problems!
  2. A strong ending – Kai Lovelace’s tale, “Head Start,” in the Department of First Stories, had a powerhouse ending because it was so unexpected. Based on the fourth-grade memories of the narrator, it focuses on his delight in Halloween, and, true to his age-appropriate sensibilities, the gorier the better. It’s one of several spooky stories in this volume, a bow to the season.
  3. Believability –Extra credit to Kate Hold for the mid-century Los Angeles she created in her delightful story “Rosabelle.” You don’t actually have to believe in ghosts to believe in her narrator and the venality of her landlady, a fortune-teller named Madame Zelda.
  4. Strong characters, right from the get-go. EQMM offers numerous candidates, but I’d choose the boy who narrates “The Phantom of the Concourse Plaza” by Jerome Charyn, whose story starts, “I was nine years old, and I lived at the Concourse Plaza with Nick Etten and eleven other New York Yankees, most of them scrubs like Hersh Martin and Don Savage, who would disappear from baseball once the war was over.” A good example of how specific detail adds to believability. You can’t fault the crime fiction awardee giving her acceptance speech in “[The Applause Dies]” by Lori Rader-Day, either.
  5. Fact based? The facts have to be right. This is one of those good-writing principles that you don’t notice until it’s violated, or some stray fact dings believability, and I have to say, from that perspective, all the stories I read were believable, or mostly so (allowances for the Halloween influence). Quite a lot of facts, fitted together so nicely that I believed them all, were in Pat Black’s “Cadere ex Stellae.” (“Fall from the Stars”—I looked it up).
Milky Way, night sky
The Milky Way (photo: Forest Wander, Creative Commons license)

Going to the Dogs

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Interested in how police and emergency service dogs are trained and used? Lots of readers are, and mystery/crime authors often want to include service dogs in their stories, but accurately. Members of the Public Safety Writers Association got a close look at that corner of the world last Saturday from organization Vice-President Steve Ditmars. Ditmars worked many years as a police service dog handler and K-9 Unit supervisor for the Long Beach (Calif.) Police Department and gave a jam-packed Zoom program on the topic.

His first piece of advice was to find out what the policies and procedures are in the locale where you’re writing about, if it’s a real place, in the time period of your fiction. Ways of handling and using dogs vary by jurisdiction, he explained, and these practices change a lot too. If the locale is totally fictional, you have more leeway.

The training process for a police service dog is extensive, but the risk here, he said, is to get so caught up in it, you give Too Much Information. Ditmars has skirted such pitfalls very well in his own books—Big Dogs, Gasping for Air, and a third (coming soon). He finds adding canine characters helps him tell a story, because they enable a variety of perspectives and events. For example, the way someone handles or react to a dog can reveal key aspects of that person’s character.

And, of course, he cautioned authors to be mindful about what happens to the dog. Many readers have a soft spot for Man’s Best Friend, especially when they’ve shown heroism, loyalty, and discipline. You can write a gritty thriller where human lives come to a bad end, but if the dog doesn’t survive the last chapter, you’ll get pushback.

Dogs can be trained to take on many different roles: search and rescue, personal protection, patrol, tracking and trailing people, finding things (narcotics, cadavers, explosives, gas leaks, even from buried pipes). Each of these roles has a different training regimen and relies on dogs’ acute senses of smell and hearing. Ditmars said they are better than humans at pinpointing where a sound is coming from.

Public safety personnel like to use dogs for certain jobs, because it saves time, in, say, searching an area or building. They can be trained to guard suspects until their handler arrives. The threat of a bite is sometimes enough to keep the suspect in place. Dogs are good for departmental public relations too, at open houses and other public events.

Just as new parents “suddenly” notice how many baby products are out there, in a few days after hearing this excellent presentation, I read two stories in which dogs played a role. They were: Doug Crandell’s lively story “Bad Hydrous” in the Sep/Oct 2024 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

Thanks, Steve, for this literary heads up!
Read more about Steve here.

Meet Author Laura van den Berg

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The interviews the late lamented Glimmer Train magazine published are a fine source of information on authors beyond, say, John Grisham and Lucy Foley. The mag’s interview with Laura van den Berg was published in 2012—a dozen years ago. Accomplished as she was at that time, she’s done even more now! Then, she was “working on” a novel (isn’t everyone?), but now she’s published three: State of Paradise, The Third Hotel, and Find Me, plus four collections of short stories, including the one with my favorite title, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. All the while, she’s been racking up the prizes. (Van den Berg’s website here.)

Her newest novel, State of Paradise, was published only two months ago and deemed a “most anticipated book” by a great many review publications. NPR said it was “at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography,” and if you know very much about Florida, van den Berg’s home state, you’ll know what a deep and complex subject that can be. “So many worlds,” she says.

In the interview, she talks about the attraction of Gatorland, where people wrestle alligators, which reminded me of Karen Russell’s 2011 Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about an entire family of Florida alligator wrestlers. Not recommended bedtime reading. “And many other parts of the state are just as strange,” van den Berg says.

Unlike so many authors, van den Berg didn’t start out to be a writer. She wanted to be a psychology major but ran into a major stumbling block: math. As a person who used to sleep with her statistics book under her pillow in case some insight would crawl out of it and into my head during the night, I can relate. What turned her attention to the possibilities of writing was discovering contemporary literature—not the classics.

Part of her learning to write fiction was to learn how not to be “willfully strange.” When her stories have strangeness in them, as they often do, it must “have roots in the characters’ lives” and not feel as if she is “imposing strangeness on them.” Certainly in writing mystery and suspense stories, events, however untoward, should not feel arbitrary or conceived merely to move the plot along. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking a particular character wouldn’t act as the story describes, you may have encountered something “willfully strange.”

Twelve years ago, van den Berg explained her attraction to magical realism themes, “monsters and myths,” as due in part to Florida’s influence. In addition, she says, “there’s so much about the world, so much mystery, that I would never understand,” that may be better described or appreciated through a totally different perspective. Her view was prescient, given the popularity of paranormal themes in fiction today. Recent crime novels with neurodivergent protagonists—Nita Prose’s The Maid, Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond, or Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross come to mind—may be another manifestation of shifted perspective.

Part of the pleasure of reading van den Berg’s work or that of the other authors I mentioned is sorting out what’s real and what isn’t. These alternative realities, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster or the power of wishes, are both “beautiful and terrifying,” she says, because in a way, “it’s easier to not believe in things.” And, “There’s a beauty to people who do live in the world with imagination, and who embrace the mystery of the world at large.”

Take it from me, it’s possible to love such flights of imagination and the cut-and-dried world of “just the facts, ma’am” police procedurals at the same time.More Recommended Florida Reading:
Swamplandia!by Karen RussellNaked Came the Florida Manby Tim Dorsey – irrepressible craziness

Keep Them in Suspense

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What is suspense? In the world of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction, it can seem like an all-purpose label for books that don’t fit the other, increasingly blurry categories. Know who the villain is?—not a mystery. Single narrator?—not a typical thriller. Bad things happening but not, technically, crimes?—not crime fiction. Occasionally, I’ve had to justify reviewing a book for the UK website CrimeFictionLover.com by saying something like “if you think it’s a crime for governments to deceive their citizens…” Not everything that’s a crime, writ large, is illegal. Just ask the fake news purveyors.

A few months ago Kathryn Schulz wrote an interesting New Yorker piece on suspense. “Like a lot of fun things,” she wrote, “suspense has a bad reputation,” and its detractors think of it as just a cheap trick to entertain “the masses” (like me!). A hundred-fifty years ago, when detective novels and mystery stories began to appear, they were criticized for merely appealing to curiosity, rather than offering nobler forms of fulfillment or ethical example.

I’ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes (complete works, 2 volumes, I’m on page 1052). It turns out The Great Detective provides not only suspense, but many ethical examples. Working outside the law enforcement apparatus, he relies on his personal sense of justice. And it doesn’t always entail turning a perpetrator over to the police, though in other situations, he does so gleefully.

The critiques are also misapplied, Schulz said, because almost every form of writing—excepting, she says, telephone directories and instruction manuals—makes use of suspense to captivate its readers. (I might disagree with her here, given some of the highly mysterious instruction manuals I’ve encountered for electronics manufactured abroad.) Shakespeare certainly deployed suspense to great effect. Will Othello kill Desdemona? Will Macbeth evade justice for slaying Duncan? Will Hamlet follow the order given by his father’s ghost? The late thriller writer Henning Mankell once said, “Every good story has a mystery in it.” I use that truism as the epigram for my own website.

Today’s descendants of the critics whose noses turned up at suspense 150 years ago today cluck over “genre fiction”—you know what that is. Mystery, romance, science fiction—in other words, the kinds of books people like to read. E.M. Forster, in noting that every fictional work must be built around a story, said that for a story to be effective, it must make readers want to know “what happens next.” That is, suspense.

While it might seem that withholding information is the key to creating suspense, Schulz points out that suspense also requires sharing information. A reader may not know what’s behind that door, but the writer has implied there are dark doings somewhere in the house; has shown the little boy’s fear; has made the rusty door handle hard to turn, but turn it he does … ever … so … slowly.

She cites Alfred Hitchcock’s example of a bomb going off in a crowded theater. The reader (or filmgoer) can know the bomb is there in advance, or not. How much more scary is it to know that the bomb is ticking away, while people blithely munch popcorn than it is to have a sudden loud Boom! and a lot of flying body parts and settling dust? Even knowing what will happen, we can feel excruciating suspense.

An excellent example of this is the new novel by Robert Harris, Precipice, set in 1914 on the very eve of World War I. He presents, verbatim, some of the hundreds [!] of love-letters UK Prime Minister H.H. Asquith wrote to young Venetia Stanley. Asquith hears the saber-rattling on the Continent, reads the desperate telegrams from diplomats in Russia and France, but can’t be distracted from his obsessive correspondence. Meanwhile, I was tearing my hair out! Because of the extreme suspense, waiting for the worst to happen, this book was one of the most gripping I’ve ever read (my review coming soon). I hope you wait for it with suspense—of the anticipation variety, not the dread kind.

Short Story Essentials

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reading, apple

Almost a year ago—how time flies!—the Central Virginia Chapter of Sisters in Crime organized a Zoom workshop on the ingredients of a great short story. They assembled a fine panel of presenters, too—Michael Bracken (well over a thousand short stories under his belt), Barb Goffman (recent winner of the Lifetime Achievement award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society), K.L. Murphy (Virginia native, novelist, and short story author) and Josh Pachter (not only a prolific writer—first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine at age 16—and anthology editor, but also an expert translator of others’ fiction).

In the piles of notes from the various seminars I Zoom in on are many intriguing insights. They often help me crystallize my own thoughts on a topic and, eventually, maybe, lead to a blog post for you. Here’s what I took away from this estimable group.

Among the most important things that a short story needs:

  • It needs a point. That’s what convinces readers the story was worth it; short stories that aspire to being literary often miss this, obscuring their vague purpose in high-flying prose. If you read the masters, like Chekhov and Gogol, the point is not only present, it’s significant. Yet it needn’t hit you over the head. It’s intrinsic. As George Saunders says, “I want my stories to move and change someone as much as these Russian stories have moved and changed me.” Dry, meandering modern stories will never achieve either impact or staying power.
  • It needs a strong ending, Goffman emphasized, which is what makes the point clear—again, even if not stated in so many words (actually, preferably if not spelled out). Trust your reader.
  • It needs believability. Even if it’s fantasy or about alien worlds, there must be a core of truth that the reader can invest in.
  • It needs strong characters, “right from the beginning,” said Murphy. She wants them to draw her in. Here’s an example: “‘Tell me the truth,’ Ruthie Ford said. ‘Why exactly did you come here?’” from John Floyd’s terrific story “Moonshine and Roses” in the Jul/Aug 2024 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. You know something—something interesting—about both these characters in just those first lines.

When selected stories for an anthology, Pachter looks for reliable writers, ones who’ve withstood, as he said, “the test of time,” which I’m guessing in part reflects writers who follow guidelines, who can meet a deadline, who won’t send in a too-early draft that will require a lot of editing. Such problems can hold up an entire project. An anthology is a collaboration among points of view, but the editor has the Master POV, the overall conception of the project, so Pachter also looks for authors who are willing to be edited, or, as Goffman put it, who will “work with me.”

If there’s fact-based information, Pachter added, the author needs to get it right. I’ve read a two stories very recently (novels, actually), where the author didn’t seem to have a good handle on the world. I referred to one of them in a post yesterday about the top temperature humans can survive at. In another, a character was bragging about her 14-carat diamond engagement ring. Whoa. That would be heavy! Not something you would/could wear every day.

Asked to suggest a memorable short story, Murphy mentioned Goffman’s “Dear Emily Etiquette,” which is one of my favorites too. It appeared in the Sep/Oct 2020 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, winning the Agatha Award as well as the magazine’s annual Reader Award. Pachter is a fan of Stanley Ellin’s “The Specialty of the House,” which appeared in EQMM in 1948; you may remember the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television version from 1959. Bracken recommends John M. Floyd’s well-plotted stories: “twist, twist, twist,” he said. And Goffman is a fan of John Connolly’s “The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository” (2013), which won both Edgar and Anthony Awards.

For more, see the authors’ websites:
Michael Bracken
Barb Goffman
K.L. Murphy
Josh Pachter

Writing as Espionage

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spy, espionage, reading

As a new generation of excellent spy fiction writers emerges in the West, I took a sentimental look back at one of my American favorites—the late Charles McCarry, writer par excellence, former CIA man, and undercover operative in Africa, Asia, and Europe. I discovered an old interview with him and found great insights for authors of every genre.

In his first novel, The Miernik Dossier, published in 1973, he was already thinking about the challenges of being a novelist. Paul Christopher, protagonist of at least ten of his novels, says, “There is an artistry to what we are doing: spies are like novelists—except that spies use living people and real places to make their works of art.” In the interview, McCarry reiterated his view that there’s a striking similarity “between the creative process and tradecraft.”

The spy’s clandestine operation is the plot with almost inevitable twists and turns; agents are akin to stories’ protagonists; and the people they interact with are love interests, antagonists, and other sometimes disruptive characters. Authors often complain about their fictional characters not sticking to the plot—“minds of their own.” They go off the page, introduce unexpected complications, misbehave. Certainly, real-life people often don’t do what you expect or want them to, either.

A lot of story complications and their fallout emerge from below the writer’s conscious level. As a person who’s a “pantser”—that is I write by the seat of my pants, rather than with elaborate notes and outlines—I appreciate McCarry’s saying that, for him, writing remained a mystery, as with spying, where “I never quite understood what was going on.” I can relate. In my novel, Architect of Courage, there was a lot in there that I didn’t even realize until I was finished. “Oh, yeah. The subconscious mind at work again.”

McCarry created a character who was the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the book Shelley’s Heart. This fictional person turned out to be much more significant than McCarry expected. “Every morning when I sat down to write my 1,500 words, he would pull some other stunt.” Yet these actions were all perfectly logical in terms of where the plot and characters were going. Somewhere in a writer’s head, he believed, the brain must be assembling elements and figuring out how they work together.

One time in Kyoto, McCarry was in a Buddhist temple, trying to meditate, and discouraged that he couldn’t clear his mind and concentrate. The Zen master said something to this effect, “Don’t you realize that what those monks are trying to achieve is what you achieve every time you write a poem or a story? That is, the opening of consciousness.” Sliding open the doors between the conscious, the unconscious, and the subconscious, so that the work can be influenced by all three.

Acclaimed author Robert Olen Butler says you’re most likely to have access to the subconscious in the early morning while you’re still half-asleep! Before caffeine, the phone, and your analytic, goal-oriented mind take over. You can sometimes tell when a piece of writing was dominated by the author’s conscious mind—or as I think of it, their head not their heart. It may be logical, but it’s thin. It hurtles head-long toward a fixed goal (conclusion), when the characters clearly want to do something else. Artists in many fields talk about arriving at a trance-like state, when they’re deeply submerged in the creative process. Writers do too! In other words, basically, they make their “whole mind” work for them.

Recent espionage novels I’ve especially enjoyed:
The Translator by Harriet Crawley
The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry
Moscow X by David McCloskey
All three novels by James Wolff that shatter spy stereotypes. The first: Beside the Syrian Sea.

Name Your Poison (actually, no, don’t)

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A thought-provoking presentation on poisons at last month’s conference of the Public Safety Writers Association reminded me of a blog post I’d written a while ago. Such a relief for a crime writer to get away from guns for a while—and don’t even talk about knives! The tagteam presentation by Janet Gregor and Gloria Casale prompted me to update my earlier post. Plus, it gives me a chance to use this painting of “Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners,” showing she didn’t let an opportunity to conduct scientific research go to waste.

A PBS documentary on poisonings begins: In 1922, 101 New Yorkers hanged themselves, 444 died in car accidents, 20 were crushed in elevators. There were 237 fatal shootings, and 34 stabbings. And that year, 997 New Yorkers died of poisoning.

Not all those deaths were intentional, it turns out. A century ago, life was full of poisoning hazards at work and at home. You may remember the below-stairs tour of cleaning products, rat poisons, polishes, and “remedies” in the movie Gosford Park, each one of which looked mighty suspicious when the master was murdered.

A major cause of death was carbon monoxide (CO), an odorless, tasteless gas that got into the air thanks to leaky stoves and gaslights piping. Even today, when houses are shut up tight for winter, we still hear about deaths from malfunctioning space heaters or, difficult to believe though this is, charcoal grills people roll inside to heat up the house. You may remember when seven members of a Minnesota family died of accidental CO poisoning in December 2021.The culprit? A faulty furnace.

apothecary bottles, poison

Still, poisonings are much rarer today than they used to be because in 1917 New York City hired Dr. Charles Norris to be the city’s (and the nation’s) first chief medical examiner. Norris, born into a wealthy family, was one of those larger-than-life characters who create their own weather. Norris, in turn, hired Alexander Gettler to head the City’s first toxicology laboratory. Gettler and his staff built the field of toxicology from scratch, and he and Norris created modern forensic science. CSI fans are grateful.

As they brought science to the analysis of murder victims, murder by poison became less and less feasible. A fun (!) read is The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. During his lifetime (120-63 BCE), Mithradates Eupator fought some of the most famous Roman generals, mostly successfully. At the height of his career, he governed 22 nations around the Black Sea and could speak all of their languages. And, he was an infamous poisoner. He believed that was how his mother murdered his father, so, to protect himself, he learned as much as he could about them.

One protection he engaged in was to take small doses of certain poisons every day to build up his tolerance. As a result, when Mithradates’ enemies gave him a lethal dose of something, it had no effect, which didn’t hurt his reputation for invincibility. He also developed a “universal antidote” to poison, still of scholarly interest. When the Romans finally captured Mithradates, he tried to commit suicide by poison, but his protection worked too well, and he was ultimately stabbed to death. Gardeners may recognize the King’s name: Eupatorium is a genus of flowering plant with several hundred species, including (and in my garden) Joe-Pye Weed. One of its species is, of course, poisonous to humans.

Much as Americans complain about “government regulations,” before the Food and Drug Administration took dangerous patent medicines off the drug store shelves in the 1920’s, and before there was a Consumer Product Safety Commission, and before the workplace safety rules that protect people like the poor young women who worked as radium dial-painters and died horribly of jaw and bone cancer, everyday life was full of deadly hazards, and mystery writers had one more handy tool in their store of potential mayhem-makers.

Want more?
12 Toxic Tales from National Geographic
The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum
The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor—fascinating!!
The Poison Artist fiction by Jonathan Moore – great use of the weapon

Crime Fiction: Partners, Sidekicks, and Foils

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Paging through the notes I’ve taken on innumerable Zoom calls—book discussions, writing tips, publishing conundrums—one from a few months ago caught my eye. The Zoom was sponsored by the New York area chapter of Mystery Writers of America, organized and moderated by expert author Gary Earl Ross of Buffalo.

It was a discussion about “partners in crime” detection—the reasons why in crime fiction the principal detective so often has a sidekick. It’s quite a useful device, because a slightly dim or new-on-the-job partner gives the detective a reason for explaining (to the reader) what they’re doing and why they’re doing it in a natural-feeling way.

As I’m rereading all of Sherlock Holmes currently, Conan Doyle uses Watson in this way. He is not dull-witted (the Nigel Bruce portrayal notwithstanding), but he finds Holmes’s methods baffling. You can empathize with his confusion, especially when Holmes is attempting some high-wire mental acrobatics, and you can feel a tiny bit superior to Watson, confident that Holmes will have it all figured out, even if you can’t see how he gets from A to Z, either.

One characteristic of our fictional detectives that readers (and viewers and hearers) like is their perseverance. Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross is like that. He doesn’t give up on an investigation, even when his superiors insist the case is solved. He keeps at it and…he’s right. As Ross said, readers appreciate an investigator who works hard. Of course, it’s the #2 who’ll have to kick in the doors (I’m looking at you, Ben Jones).

In cozy mysteries the bake shop owner (etc.) and her confederates (shop assistant, sister, best friend) frequently encounter a kind of person they don’t generally have to deal with. These meetings inspire readers’ thoughts of how they would handle that kind of person or situation. And, in cozies, having these confederates around provides some safety in numbers.  

Partners can not only provide flashes of insight, they also earn their keep by inserting a bit of humor. The lead detective’s colleagues in the New Zealand cozy-adjacent television series Brokenwood (quite fun) are not only good investigators themselves, they contribute big-time to squadroom humor.

Conveying a sense of justice is good rationale for the genre. But that’s not always simple. I’m thinking about S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears—one of his very best—and the uneasy partnership between two very different fathers. It’s that collaboration that lets Cosby explore highly fraught social territory.

Justice, of course, doesn’t always mean following the letter of the law, or even enforcing the laws. Having a partner lets a character thrash out those options. Here I’m thinking of The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark—a wonderful tale about a public defender and his colleagues trying not to be outplayed by the man they’re defending. In crime stories, characters with a strong sense of right and wrong may find it in the law and, sometimes, outside it. In tricky situations, it’s great to have a partner you trust to hash things out with.

Sisters in Crime’s Promophobia

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The title of the Sisters in Crime author guide, Promophobia, cleverly encapsulates the dilemma of the modern fiction author. Although there certainly are exceptions, authors tend to be ruminators. They love quiet time for concentration and creativity. You could even say that when they are “alone with their thoughts,” they are never alone. Their characters are always up to something.

Many authors love the time they spend researching their story, plucking the best approach to conveying an idea or personality from a haystack of possibilities, and quietly wrangling plots that seem determined to get on a horse and ride off in all directions.

Once a book is published (or even en route to being published), writers must attempt to dramatically shift personalities. They have to become determined marketers, engaging in many activities that will put themselves and their work out there. In short, they must do something antithetical to who they are. They may respond to exhortations to embrace the business side of the craft, by muttering, “Just let me write.” Media relations, public speaking, creating blurbs, strategizing ad campaigns, tackling social media, designing newsletters, foiling scammers. Even Hindu goddess Kali would be hard-pressed to keep up.

Promophobia, indeed. Many authors find all this difficult, more than a few believe it will be impossible, and almost no one believes they are doing it as well as they ought.

Promophobia, subtitled “Taking the Mystery Out of Promoting Crime Fiction” is here to help! The book is edited by Diane Vallere, author of more than 40 books, including crime mystery series, and past president of Sisters in Crime national. The book’s 63 chapters are written by leading names in crime fiction publication and tackle authors’ principal problems, described as fears, for example: the fear of knowing your niche (just in case your book isn’t for “everybody”), fear of social media, of online promotion, of thinking outside the box, of connecting with readers. I’ve found the last one the most rewarding. Discussing my book with readers who’ve taken the trouble to form an opinion about it is a terrific learning experience. They ask questions I hadn’t thought of, and when I discover there’s actually a good answer, that characters and situations really do hang together, I silently thank my subconscious mind for working all that out for me.  

Any reclusive author can take comfort from the article written by Lori Rader-Day. Yes, it challenges writers to get out there and promote, but it ends with the consoling advice, “Write Another Book.” Big exhale.

Vallere wisely cautions against attempt to adopt every one of the book’s ideas. You have to pick and choose those that best match your own opportunities, skills, and interests. No one can do it all, and not every strategy works all the time or for everyone. But the hard-won insights in this volume will help you achieve better results with the promotional challenges you do engage with.