Category Archives: Fiction

Writing Tips: 38 Ways to Improve

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Click-bait headlines like “The Six Grammar Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes” or “Ten Rules for Writing Mysteries” lure me in every time, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when a savvy friend forwarded me a blurb for The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickham. It was originally published in 1992 and reprinted in 1997. Anyone familiar with this book or him?

Amazon lets me take a look at the table of contents, and it’s charmingly aggressive: Chapter 10, “Don’t Have Things Happen for No Reason,” (so unlike real life, then); Chapter 16, “Don’t Let (Characters) Be Windbags,” (no BOGSAT* here); Chapter 28, “Don’t Worry What Mother Will Think”!; and, something every writer needs, Chapter 37, “Don’t Give Up.”

I have a shelf full of writing-advice books and some are really excellent. And some are more excellent at some times than others. A lot of this advice kind of passes over my head, but when I’m faced with a particular story problem, even one I can’t quite define, the same advice I’ve read many times before finally hits the bulls-eye. A book organized like Bickham’s would at least help me focus on what I think is the problem, though I may be wrong!

While a lot of story constraints and possibilities have changed since 1997—social media, cell phone ubiquity, as examples—the fundamentals of character development, plot clarity, and scene construction stay pretty much the same, unless you’re writing experimental fiction (which I find generally unreadable).

Bickham, who wrote and published more than 90 novels in various genres—crime, espionage, westerns—and under various names, died in 1997. He’s was a University of Oklahoma professor and was awarded the university’s highest honor for teaching excellence. I think that comes through in the down-to-earth approach he takes in this book. If you find you like The 38, he’s written five other books on such craft specifics as scene and structure, short stories, and the like.

If you know this book, tell us whether you found it useful.

*BOGSAT: Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking

Image by Markus Winkler for Pixabay.

The Epilogue of August

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The Epilogue of August, the captivating debut crime mystery by Jennifer Milder, unwraps the title character’s secrets like a succession of nesting boxes. It demonstrates the truth William Faulkner captured when he said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Janus is a middle-aged woman living in Brooklyn when she receives a phone call she’s awaited for years. Her mother, August, is dying in the oceanfront town of Seaville, North Carolina. Bad timing, of course. The Thanksgiving holiday looms. Janus has no desire or, initially, no intention to go to her prickly mother’s bedside, but there’s no one else. She goes. The competing pulls of duty and self-preservation are palpable here. In a way, it’s curiosity that wins out.

The name Janus (mostly called Jan in the book) is a perfect choice for the main character. Looking backward and gradually revealing the layers of her mother’s and her own lives—eventually, even her grandmother’s—and looking ahead to her mother’s death is exactly what occupies Jan in this novel.

Jan has indelible, unhappy memories of her chaotic early years living with her single mom in camps and communes. August has painful memories too, especially of the murder of a pair of sisters that took place in the town one long-ago summer. Nelson McCready, a young Black man, was tried and acquitted of one of the killings and never brought to trial for the other. Because technically the case is still open, he can’t leave, sentenced to live in a community where everyone believes him guilty.

As August’s fragile health declines, Jan seeks out friends from her own past and that of her mother and grandmother. You may anticipate a few of her discoveries, but author Milder has significant twists in store. To Jan, the journey she’s on is personal, but as her mother’s story is gradually revealed, she comes closer and closer to uncovering the secrets behind the long-ago murders.

All told, this is a complex, layered portrait of mother and daughter, and even though family dramas are not usually my cup of tea, here the characters are completely, heart-breakingly believable. Coupled with an accomplished writing style, that realism makes the story immersive and deeply engaging. The story packs in so much, it’s hard to believe that the present-day action takes place over the course of only about a week.

The book appears to be self-published, and a commercial publisher might have suggested different formatting choices. Some readers may be put off by the book’s 579 pages, but that number is misleading. The way the pages are laid out there are fewer words per page than in a conventional book and, trust me, it moves along rapidly. This is a truly remarkable debut, and I look forward to more from this author.

Imagining Holmes’s Place in History – Guest Post by Richard T. Ryan

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Where exactly is Sherlock Holmes’s place in history? Well, if you’re a writer the answer to that is rather simple: It’s anyplace you care to put him—within reason.

Like so many other pasticheurs, I enjoy placing Sherlock Holmes in situations that are grounded in reality. In other words, I think of my works as a blend of history and mystery. I like to think of it as Conan Doyle meets Dan Brown.

With a background in the medieval and early Renaissance periods, I’m always seeing various connections that span the centuries. As a result, druids figure prominently in one of my works, The Druid of Death, as does the ogham system of writing, used hundreds of years ago by the Irish.

In another work, I focused on the plique-à-jour style of jewelry-making, and was fortunate that the best example of this technique—The Mérode Cup—happened to be housed in the South Kensington Museum (which became the Victoria and Albert Museum some years later) and shown here.

An article about Fabergé eggs, and the discovery that Consuela Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, had commissioned the Pink Serpent Egg served as the starting point for my novel The Merchant of Menace. Also worth noting is that the Duchess was the first person outside of Russia to own one of these masterpieces.

Sometimes an event sends me scurrying down the research rabbit hole. I was intrigued when I learned that a group of Scottish students had stolen the Stone of Scone on Christmas Day in 1950. They pilfered the artifact in an effort to attract attention to the cause of Home Rule for Scotland. In The Stone of Destiny, I changed things a bit to suit the history of Holmes’s times and had a group of Irish separatists abscond with the stone in order to delay the coronation of King Edward VII.

In my most recent book, The Devil’s Disciples, which is due out later this year, I once again examine the question of Home Rule for Ireland. This time I focus on the Fenian dynamite campaign that plagued London in the mid- and early 1880s. Among the targets was the London Bridge, followed a few weeks later by the Tower of London, the House of Commons, and Westminster Hall—all on the same night!

At that point, Holmes is contacted by Her Majesty’s government and tasked with bringing the bombers to heel. This is a more in-depth look at the question of freedom for Ireland, and I touch on such events as the potato famine; the support for the movement in America, specifically from a group called the Clan na Gael; and one particular individual who shall live in Irish infamy forever.

The challenge in my books is to insert Holmes into these events without disturbing the line that is history. Sometimes, it’s fairly easily accomplished, but at other times it can be a real struggle. And, of course, I also have to find a place for Dr. Watson, so in some instances it is doubly tricky.

If you’d like to check out The Devil’s Disciples, this link will take you to its page on Kickstarter, and you can see part of the cover and check out the various rewards. Right now, we are at 94 backers, if we get to 100, everyone will receive $50 worth of free Holmes ebooks as a bonus.

The Mérode Cup photograph is licensed by CC (view license here).

The Man in the Corduroy Suit by James Wolff

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James Wolff writes a different kind of spy novel, and his new one, The Man in the Corduroy Suit, is no exception. Wolff’s British intelligence agents are renegades. Jonas Worth, whose antics were the subject of the first book in the series, Beside the Syrian Sea, and agent-runner August Drummond from How to Betray Your Country, the second, both found themselves at odds with their bureaucracies. Wolff’s storytelling skills are such that you adopt these oddball characters and want them to succeed, despite the parallel imperative for the system to function. There’s no formula evident in Wolff’s stories; each is a plunge into the unknown.

The protagonist of this story, Leonard Flood, has acquired a reputation: blunt and prickly. If he comes up short on social skills, he’s also a relentless questioner, who through sheer persistence can pry information out of an interviewee. Or an unwilling colleague. In other words, he can be a pain in the neck. Wolff draws Leonard’s—and his other characters’—personalities with an artist’s eye for the telling detail, including the corduroy suit Leonard favors, irrespective of weather.

Reading about Wolff’s bureaucratic misfits, you may be reminded of Mick Herron’s Slough House series. The difference is that, flawed though Herron’s characters are, they do form something of a team. And they can hold it together to resolve a problem. Wolff’s characters skate out onto the thin ice mostly alone, and the problems to be solved are, if not wholly of their own making, specific to them. Like Herron, Wolff has a finely-honed ability to skewer the absurdities of bureaucratic life and the foibles of his oh-so-human characters.

The head of an MI5 unit called Gatekeeping, which covertly investigates the agency’s own personnel, asks Flood to look into the activities of a retired officer, Willa Karlsson, who has been struck down by a mysterious illness. Alarmingly, she seems to have been the victim of some hard-to-detect Russian poison. Karlsson for many years worked in New Recruit Vetting. She is, in fact, the very person who vetted Flood. As the boss is quick to point out, she also vetted intelligence analyst Jonas Worth and agent-runner August Drummond from books one and two. Their wandering off the straight-and-narrow still stings. Worse, how many other dodgy personnel did Karlsson approve? Was she on a deliberate campaign to undermine the agency? To introduce people whose personal weaknesses would make them vulnerable? In short, how many bad apples are in the MI5 barrel?

Flood doesn’t have much time to figure it out, either. Once he thinks he has, the atmosphere of the story darkens, and you can’t be sure whom he should trust or what he can risk taking for granted. When so recently in real life, a young American man let loose into the world a large cache of international intelligence, this book can make you think hard about whether you ever do or can know enough about the people called upon to protect a nation’s closest secrets.

While I won’t go into specifics about the ending, it’s one of those satisfyingly unexpected but well laid out scenarios, much like one the late John le Carré might devise. I thoroughly enjoyed this cerebral book—the quirky personalities, the clever plot, the sly tone. Although even Leonard doesn’t figure out Willa Karlsson’s motive, I suspect you will.

A very, very good read!

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Where Did the Month of May Go?

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Two vacations and a flurry of county book fairs have made the past few weeks fly by without blog posts. Recently, I made a little change to my book cover with a see-through label clearly indicating it’s a thriller (after a book fair visitor kept haranguing me—“It doesn’t signal it’s a thriller!”). The label works like a charm: photo shows how it came out.

Later this month I’m looking forward to a Sisters in Crime reading, a Mystery Writers of America get-together, and next month, the Public Safety Writers Association annual conference. All that hasn’t slowed down my reading. Because I read 40-50 crime/mystery/thriller books each year for CrimeFictionLover.com, a site that focuses on NEW books, and CRIME FICTION, I rarely read books that don’t fit those parameters. But lately, a few exceptions.

Best was Just Mercy, “a story of justice and redemption,” by Bryan Stevenson (one extended story in it became the movie starring Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan, which also was great). Reading it was inspired by our trip to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Very affecting, as you’d expect and highly recommended. Crime yes; fiction, unfortunately, no.

One of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics—Obelists at Sea, C. Daly King, 1932—hit my desk. It’s about a murder during a 1930s transatlantic crossing. A group of psychologists on board ship, each with a different theory about how to identify the perpetrator, tries to help the captain. One by one, their theories fail. There are a few good cracks at the profession, but the comic potential wasn’t fully exploited. And it was slooooow. Some of the characters’ rampant anti-Semitism (and knowing what came afterward in real life, so few years later), made it hard to enjoy. “Obelists,” the author explains, are people who harbor suspicions. That’s a word that should come in pretty handy these days.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, an award-winning literary novel that was a “best book of the year” a decade ago (I’m way behind) is an exploration of the ravages of war, set in Chechnya. In winter. Betrayal, murder, torture, random maiming, privation, inexplicable compassion, and the enduring power of love. A little grim for me. The title comes from a definition of what constitutes “life” found in a medical dictionary. No doubt this could be considered crime fiction on an epic scale.

The Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself, says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

You’re Leaving? Story Endings

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The First Line Monday facebook page is a painless education on what works and what doesn’t as the first line/lines in a novel. And, how much people’s opinions about working/not working vary! All writers are advised that the openings of their books, if that not one single line, are critical in finding agents, publishers, and readers. What about the ending? That’s important too in a different way. It’s the author’s last chance to make a point or an impression. Or not.

I’ve written about endings before—endings and ambiguity, book endings that disappoint. Here I’m going to do what the facebook page does and just provide the last lines as a standalone. The big difference is, of course, that by the time you get to the last line, you’ve (most likely) read the rest of the book. So you interpret the words much differently than you would a first line. You have context. Still, some lines work better than others in planting a lasting seed.

Here are a few:

“The automonk carried the empty wicker basket up the beach. Eiko followed.” (Ray Nayler’s wonderful The Mountain Under the Sea). This line conveys a since of “ok, life goes on here,” in its quotidian way, which is a very hopeful place to end. Read the whole book and find out why!

“That’s where we are. Well past the Christiansburg exit. Past Richmond, and still pointed east. Headed for the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.” (Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Dickens’s David Copperfield adapted to today’s also-not-very-kind-to-children-in-difficult-circumstances world—a fantastic book). The reader knows the “one big thing” is the ocean (and so much more of life) and that Damon believes it “won’t swallow me alive” because he’s protected against drowning, but also because, in other aspects of life, he’s developed the skills and relationships to save himself. A perfect summation of the entire book.

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.” (Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch). Opinions about this book vary, and this last sentence is a good example of why I think the whole final quasi-philosophical section is just Too Much.

“There’s nothing as exciting as a fresh new start when the page is blank and the future is all for the making!” (Janice Hallett’s clever The Appeal). The last words are from Izzy, the clueless instigator of a lot of bad stuff, and the exclamation point represents her perfectly.

“He is far from England now, far from these islands, from the waters salt and fresh. He has vanished; he is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.” (Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, third in her trilogy about Tudor England’s Thomas Cromwell). I frankly don’t know how she wrote this; I would have been weeping all over my typewriter, but to have to write the moment of Cromwell’s death after so many intimate pages, I think this, with its poetic tone, really works.

“Kate found her seat. Never looked back.” (Cara Black’s Three Hours in Paris). This ending certainly fits, because through the whole of this WWII thriller, Kate doesn’t seem to think about consequences.

Do you have some favorite endings? Ones you thought really worked well?

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The Greenleaf Murders

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The sense of place is so strong in some crime novels that their setting—London, Paris, St. Mary Meade—practically becomes one of the characters. You get a good example of that in RJ Koreto’s new mystery, The Greenleaf Murders, in which a Manhattan Gilded Age mansion takes on that role. It’s a non-speaking part, of course, except that the house does seem to speak to the book’s protagonist. She’s a young woman architect planning the top-to-bottom renovation named Wren Fontaine. Not only that, this mansion has secrets to tell.

Koreto introduces plausible antagonists drawn from the nature of Wren work. For example, a downmarket property development firm that renovates (on the cheap) historic homes and turns them into Bed-and-Breakfasts. The developer’s representative has her eyes on the Greenleaf property, despite the pall of neglect hanging over the mansion now. The owner, Steven Greenleaf, is cagey about his plans for the building, but he’s firm on the point that the only current resident, his elderly Aunt Agnes and her companion, Mrs. Ryan, will keep their small apartment. Mrs. Ryan, née Murphy, is the last of a long line of Murphys with an intimate—possibly too intimate—connection to the Greenleafs. For generations, the Murphys worked for the family as maids, drivers, kitchen help, and now, companion. It’s a shared history with all the twists and reversals you may expect, starting with the long-dead corpse Wren finds in the attic.

The police check it out, but, really, they’re more concerned about twenty-first century crimes, and their interest picks up when the property developer turns up dead, shot by the same gun that killed the attic corpse a century before.

Digging for clues to the killings that will help her understand the house gives Wren the opportunity to interact with some interesting secondary characters. There’s Mrs. Ryan’s son, patient Sergeant Ortiz from the NYPD, and a historic preservation purist who knows more about the details of the house than it seems he should. And, there’s a descendant of one of the original owners–a member of the prominent Vanderwerf family. These characters liven up the story, as Wren herself tends to brood. Mostly, she worries she doesn’t have the people skills needed for her job. Houses, ok, she can relate to them, but people? Luckily for Wren, Heather Vanderwerf has every intention of bringing her out of her shell.

The story moves along steadily, but at a stately pace suitable to the mansion itself, as Wren amasses information and develops her theories. I liked Koreto’s writing style and could envision the house and its influence on the characters, though, at times, the dialog seemed contrived to move the plot forward.

To me, the house and the story seem to say we don’t really escape the past, and more of it is with us all the time than we recognize or acknowledge. Wren, with her dedication to preserving the past, as reflected in the homes people designed and lived in, understands this better than most.

Order here from Amazon (affiliate link).

Know someone who loves rehabbing old houses or Gilded Age New York? They’ll love this!

The Bone Records

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What’s most fun about Rich Zahradnik’s new crime thriller set in Brooklyn, The Bone Records, is the peek into worlds most of us haven’t experienced first-hand. It tells the story of Grigg (Grigoriy) Orlov, whose father has been missing for five months. Grigg is trying to find him.

As the story begins, Grigg searches for Dad between his daytime job working for the city and a more intriguing evening gig at Coney Island’s Conquistador Arcade. He has scoured his Coney Island neighborhood and the Little Odessa portion of Brighton Beach, where Russian émigrés like his father gravitate. A high school teacher, his father was well known and liked. Surely, someone must have an idea whom his father might have connected with, where he might have gone.

Grigg doesn’t fit into the community the way his father always has. His mother, who died when he was a toddler, was from Jamaica. To the Russians, he will always be an outsider. The author gives you a good sense of Grigg’s anxieties and makes them seem well-founded. He feels out of place, and you feel it too.

Late one night, asleep in his empty house, Grigg is awakened by an intruder. It’s Dad! But hard on his heels is a man with a gun. The Orlovs try to escape, and his father is mortally wounded. He leaves Grigg two things: his dying words, which are “Get to Katia. Katia Sokolov—” and a strange black tube. Katia’s and Grigg’s fathers were best friends and left the Soviet Union together. She may know something, but her orbit is another place he doesn’t seem to fit.

Once he and Katia unroll the tube, they discover it is a bootleg sound recording (and not a good one) of the old Buddy Holly song, “Not Fade Away.” In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was busily banning Western music and performers, rock n roll fans recorded blacklisted songs on discarded X rays and surreptitiously sold and traded them. They called them bone records. Author Zahradnik provides just enough background information about Soviet life to suggest the secrets the fathers left behind. Very possibly, the past has now reached out to snare his father, and maybe Grigg too.

He’s convinced the police won’t give the investigation a good try, and in a well-worn staple of amateur detective fiction, decides he will have to investigate the murder himself. Katia will help. This quest brings him into inevitable conflict with the Russian mafia, vicious crime lords who dominate Little Odessa. Constantly running into new dangers, he’s on a carousel whirling faster and faster. To get off is to die.

The story’s Coney Island amusement park backdrop was fun, and I enjoyed the complex web of relationships in the local Russian émigré community. The neighborhood comprises just a few square blocks in south Brooklyn, yet gives this thriller a distinctive flavor. The result is as much a roller coaster ride for the reader as a turn on the Coney Island Cyclone.

Rich Zarahdnik is the author of the Coleridge Taylor mysteries, including Lights Out Summer, which won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 2018.

Damascus Station

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So many former CIA analysts turn to writing fiction, you have to wonder whether real life outside the agency seems to lack sufficient drama. Whatever, their willingness to lay bare their former lives often redounds to the benefit of fans of realistic spy fiction, like me. David McCloskey’s debut thriller, Damascus Station, is one of the best. I listened to the audio version, narrated by Andrew B. Wehrlen, and found it utterly engaging.

In the early days of the Syrian uprising, around 2011, Americans are determined to infiltrate the multi-pronged and highly paranoid security apparatus of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It’s a challenging task but certainly well worth doing.

CIA case officer Sam Joseph is helping his colleague and friend, Valerie Owens, exfiltrate an important Syrian asset. Assad’s agents are everywhere, and the panicky agent misses his meeting with Joseph and Owens. When their safe house is attacked, Joseph escapes, and Owens is arrested. Because she has diplomatic protection, they believe she will be safe. Not so. Evidence eventually emerges of her torture and death.

Joseph has plenty of motivation to return to Syria. Not only does he want to avenge Owens’s death, he must find and recruit another Syrian to help undermine the shaky Assad regime. Though student rebellions and terrorists’ assassination campaigns are doing their bit to destabilize the political situation, plenty of ruthless bad guys lead Assad’s security forces. Their anxieties and rivalries create a situation as stable as a bowl of nitroglycerine in an earthquake. The Americans need a fearless, highly motivated mole to go up against them.

Joseph finds the kind of person he’s looking for in Mariam Haddad, daughter of a commander in the Syrian Army and niece of a colonel in Assad’s chemical weapons program. Haddad works in Assad’s Palace—effectively Assad’s personal office. She is in a position to learn secrets. For family reasons, she’s vulnerable to Joseph’s outreach. McCloskey creates a nice balance between Mariam’s fear and self-doubt, on one hand, and her determination to bring down the evil men leading the security forces, on the other.

I wish McCloskey hadn’t chosen to raise the stakes by having Joseph and Haddad break one of the iron rules of clandestine work and fall in love, even though that makes the situation more dangerous for them both. Despite the cliché overtones, McCloskey manages to keep their relationship real. The tension keeps building as what he needs Haddad to do becomes increasingly difficult, and as evidence accumulates about an unthinkably deadly plot.

David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst whose writing bears the stamp of authenticity, and the book has received much praise by former Agency personnel. It was a finalist for the International Thriller Writers’ Best First Novel Award in 2022. Narrator Andrew Wehrlen makes Sam Joseph a convincing American character and creates distinctive voices for the many Syrian bad-guys as well. Highly recommended.

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