I’m not ready!

I’m not ready!

Things pile up, and I keep digging myself out. Sometimes literally, as when I was moving my sister’s household into a tiny assisted living apartment last summer and then finding good homes for what didn’t fit and recycling everything else possible. One son, helping, said if she’d disposed of all the many years’ worth of paper in a timely fashion, none of it would have been recycled. A happy thought.

She’s not a hoarder, but she’d call herself a packrat. The older I get, the less I want to be one.

But it’s just plain work to dig out. Not only the physical effort, and these days I need help with some of that. But the decisions! I’m stuck with making those myself. Sorting clothes and books and plain (or fancy) things doesn’t give me much trouble, not that I’m all that neat. But sorting through ideas for stories I’m not ready to write . . . how will I know when it’s time to toss them? Is there anything I’d hate for someone else to see when I’m past doing the sorting myself? For that matter, am I even interested in notes I wrote years ago? I ought to dump the lot of them. Make more room for what I think I need to keep.

And yet . . .

I remember sitting in an airport with my mother once, killing time before one of us (I forget which one) had to get on a plane. So I started asking about things I knew she knew from way back, and she told me. Will I ever use those notes on how to start a Model T Ford? Or how to caponize a chicken (with drawings)? Not things that come up in casual conversation, but I suppose they might be useful sometime, and they were from Mom, after all. As a girl, she learned to start that car to drive her veterinarian father from farm to farm. And before training to be a nurse, she held the twist on the horse’s nose for many a farmer who was too soft-hearted to do it while her father did whatever she was distracting the horse from. So the notes I made that day are tucked into a folder in a filing cabinet down in the basement with other personal memories, not taking up much space, not hurting anybody.

What’s my hurry?

The little niggling voice in the back of my head says to me, you never know. You’re getting old. What if it happens all of a sudden, not gradually? What if today you’re fine and tomorrow you’re not, and someone needs to do everything for you? Are you ready for that?

No, I’m not. So I make another attempt at neatening my life. Put a list of my accounts and such into the computer, with automatic payments and all that, for whoever might have to follow up after me. But I remember how one man’s family couldn’t get past his password to find his life insurance, much less any other financial records. Better remind the younger members of the family where to look.

We’re told our advance directives belong in a clear plastic envelope in the freezer, because it’s the most fireproof spot in the house, and because emergency personnel are trained to look there, at least in our town. So, even though we did the legal stuff years ago, we have several of those plastic envelopes with forms to fill out, waiting for us all (young people too) to get around to doing it. They say Thanksgiving is a good time to talk through those decisions together, when all the family are gathered around the table. I suppose so, but it wasn’t my idea of how to spend that meal.

All those murder victims in mysteries–how many of them are ready? And who looks in the freezer?

The Problem of Mrs. Southcott.

Wendy Hornsby

 The following was  adapted from my semi-weekly column, “No Mystery Here,” that runs in the Long Beach Grunion Gazette.

            The topic of conversation at our house one morning last week was the fractious state of public higher education.   California State University faculty were on strike for the first time ever over non-delivery of a negotiated pay raise, students were tear-gassed at the Chancellor’s Office while protesting yet another fee hike.   Students at Long Beach CityCollege, where I teach history, were noticeably edgy:   spring registration opened last week and already there are waiting lists for many essential transfer classes.   My husband and I were comparing what is happening now with the demonstrations during our own college years, a turbulent time on campus.  Paul chimed in with Dickens’ opening line from The Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness….”

            And then, as he is wont to do, he sent the conversation off on a new path by saying, “In the opening, Dickens mentions Mrs. Southcott.  But she never shows up again in the book.  Did he forget about her?”

            I suggested that it’s a big book with a dense plot, and maybe he did forget.  When Howard Hawks was directing the screen version of Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” in 1946 one of the screen writers, none other than William Faulkner, noticed that at the end one of the murders remained unresolved.   Hawks and Faulkner called Chandler, and asked, “Who killed Arthur Geiger?”  Chandler reread his book and called back to say that he had no clue; he neglected to tie up that story thread.

         How often do characters and plot lines disappear, never to be resolved?  It was an interesting question, but  I had plenty to do that morning  other than pursue an obscure reference.   The edited manuscript of  The Hanging, the Maggie MacGowen Mystery that Perseverance will publish in the fall, is again in Meredith’s hands, so I am once again at work on the historical novel  that had been put aside for the duration.    But try not thinking about something.    I went to the bookshelves and pulled down the Dickens classic – hadn’t read it for decades – to see what he had said about Mrs. Southcott:  In 1775 Mrs. Southcott turned twenty-five.   That’s all he said.    I Googled her to see what I could find about this anomalous character, and ran right into the endless conundrum I wrestle with as I write my first historical novel:     How does the writer portray people and events from the past in a way that is at once accurate, interesting, and accessible to the contemporary reader?  

           Mrs. Joanna Southcott, it turns out, was an actual person who claimed to be able see the future and who portended doom forLondon, among other prophecies.  If she was twenty-five in 1775, she would have been dead and buried when Dickens dropped her name into his book in 1859, but she was still someone who was well known to his readers.   Dickens used the reference to her age to move his readers back in time about eighty-five years, something like saying to readers, “When Abe Lincoln was a boy,” to give a story a time context.

           The problem for readers now, of course, is that Mrs. Southcott’s fame has faded over time and the reference to her has become so obscure that it is meaningless to most of us who read Dickens.  As a teacher, I figured out a long time ago that I constantly need to update my frames of reference to help students relate to various topics.    Demographically, current undergraduates were in elementary school when 9/11 happened and weren’t yet born when the Cold War ended.  Vietnam?  Their grandfathers tell them about fighting in the jungles.  I can’t drop the Free Speech Movement into a discussion of recent student and faculty protests and expect this generation to know what that was.  If I asked what they knew about D. B. Cooper most of them would only shrug, as they did when I mentioned the Sharks and the Jets, unfamiliar to them even when I sang a little of the “Jet Song:” 

              When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way
              From your first cigarette
              To your last dying day.

I got some giggles from them, but no recognition. 

            In the classroom I can explain and illustrate and repeat – and sing if necessary, dance if I could - until I detect some glimmer of understanding in student responses or on their faces.  In a novel there is no such luxury; quick, deft strokes are we get.   

             My historical tale begins with the beheading of King Charles I in London in 1649.    Big drama, lots of action.   I can’t stop the action to deliver a lecture about the English Civil Wars and why the king is losing his head, but I do need to offer enough explanation so that the time frame is clear, the events are understood sufficiently to support the story, and the characters are believable.   To do this, I use my own versions of Mrs. Southcott by weaving well-known historical figures among my fictional ones:  diarist Samuel Pepys as an obnoxious teenager; poet and teacher John Milton in middle age, going blind; Puritans a plenty; and Oliver Cromwell, of course, riding along the edges.    

           Next issue, making Shakespeare’s contemporaries not sound Shakespearean.   Juggling all the elements is fun, but it is challenging. 

          Let me tell you about Jolly Olde England in 1649.  I could say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but any editor would hit that with a red pencil so fast ….

        Today we are reminded that no matter how difficult present circumstances may seem, we still have much to be grateful for.   I wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving.

The Pros and Cons of Writing Real Folks into Fiction

More than once in some of the listservs where I lurk and on occasion blurt out my thoughts, someone will write that if s/he encounters a real person as protagonist in a novel–s/he’ll abandon the book.

I swallow hard to read this, since my two recent mysteries feature real-life Mary Wollstonecraft, along with sundry historical booksellers, orphans, artists, governesses, clergymen, murderers who once walked, stumbled, or slept in the wild streets of an 18th-century city. But I love history and I love the people who made it, and since there are no time machines to zoom me back into the murky past, I can try to enter and reinvent their lives through my writing.

And I’m not alone. The New York Times Book Review recently noted “an exotic fictional growth (that) has begun to overrun the biographical landscape.” Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen (in Stephanie Barron’s mysteries) have all come to vibrant life on the page. Or digging deep into theatrical history, consider Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Henry VIII, and many others. “Unlike the biographer,” the Times allows, “the novelist is not constrained by documented facts or their frustrating absence, and is free to roam–always keeping authenticity and plausibility in mind, through character and motive.”

Of course there can be pitfalls using real people, especially those with litiginous descendants. I should have learned my lesson back in ’89 when I published a memoir in which I used people’s names without written permission. I had treated everyone lovingly, I felt, yet still sighed with relief when no one sued–especially after one acquaintance complained that I ‘d told a humorous story about her father who manufactured and relished his own booze. Anyone who knew the man already “knew,” but now his flaw was in print for all to see. Oh dear.

But had I not used real names, my critic might not have discovered her father as a character. For often, I’ve found, people perceive themselves differently from the way others might see them. Once my mother-in-law was dead certain she recognized herself as an elegant clubwoman, when I’d actually cast her as a bossy bus driver. I never told her that. We writers have to keep a few secrets of the trade, don’t we?

So yes, I feel safer using historical figures (Hogarth painting above), even when they might have numerous descendants, like Robert King from my novel Midnight Fires. The aristocrat King shot his daughter’s lover point blank, with impunity, when she refused an arranged marriage. To me, that put him virtually in the public domain; I felt free to portray him as the womanizer and tyrant he was. My protagonist Mary and her six siblings had no living heirs, so I’d no worries there. But critics called Mary “mad, a hyena in petticoats” after the publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman; and “licentious, wanton” when she returned from revolutionary Paris with a natural child. My mission, then, in using her persona, was to show her as the original, caring, though conflicted, woman she truly was.

But I had to keep her in her historical time and place, and thoroughly research her life and personality in order to “become her.” I think my diligent editor Meredith Phillips did as much research as I did to keep me on track! The five biographies I read, along with Mary’s collected letters, helped with this task–I could hear her voice (she loved to talk) in my inner ear. Moreover, I had to make her a believable sleuth–not a hard task as she had a brilliant, inquisitive mind, and though a bit of a random-abstract, was determined to right any wrongs in her world. She once “kidnapped” her sister from an abusive husband, changing carriages in mid-flight with the fellow in hot pursuit, while the sister bit her wedding ring “to pieces!”

So fellow scribes, if you’re up for the challenge, try choosing a colorful, conflicted person living in eventful times, and I guarantee you’ll have fun. The underlying plot is basically your character’s life story already spread out before you; your job is to blend fact with fiction so seamlessly that, in the words of Patricia Wynn, author of the superb Blue Satan series, it will be all but impossible to see “where fact ends and fiction begins.”

The Cowboy Way

by Laura Crum

How do we choose the background/setting of our novels? I was asked that question the other day, in the course of a class I’m teaching at the local community college about “How to Write and Publish a Mystery.” Of course, I can’t answer how other authors make their choice. But for me, it was easy. I wanted to write about horses, specifically western horses, because horses have been my life. Horses and the cowboy way.
I was raised (in the horse biz, anyway) by a bunch of team roping cowboys, and their particular mindset really shaped me. I notice this quite a bit when I interact with folks that don’t come from that world. There often seems to be a sort of disconnect between us. I was thinking about this the other day and wondering why, and I had a light bulb moment. Its all about the cowboy way.
The cowboy way isn’t something you can learn from a book. Its something you have to live. Its easy to say that its about horses and cattle, and that’s true, as far as it goes. But it really amounts to a lot more than that.
Defining the cowboy way isn’t easy, but I’ll try. It has to do with being willing to get the job done, not whining about cold fingers or mud or dust or heat (or all the rest of the weather that Mother Nature can throw at you). It has to do with a sort of matter of fact physical courage and team spirit as well as an ability to read livestock accurately. Cowboys aren’t usually too chatty (until they’ve had a drink) and they are often pretty blunt. They have both a sense of pride and a sense of respect. They stand out when you put them somewhere in the modern world. They draw the eye. They don’t look much like suburban office workers, even if they choose to wear chinos and T-shirts and sneakers. There is an air of dignity about them.
In truth, a description like this doesn’t make much sense, which is why I spent a good deal of time in my first five novels trying to portray the cowboy way. The old “show not tell” approach. My desire to paint a portrait of the cowboy life as I have known it is a lot of what motivated me to write my mystery novels in the first place.
You might wonder what mysteries have to do with cowboys, and other than the fact that mysteries can be set in pretty much any venue, the answer is quite simple. My favorite mystery author was Dick Francis—not least because of the authentic horse lore that was so often woven into his stories. His jump jockies resembled, in many ways, the cowboys I grew up with and worked with and for– practical, tough, understated guys who could both take a hit and loved working with horses. When I was thirty years old, I decided to try to write a mystery novel based on my background in the horse biz, in flagrant imitation of Dick Francis (who by the way corresponded with me for years—I sent him my books and he never failed to write back with both praise and helpful suggestions).
Having grown up with the cowboy way, I tend to admire folks like this. I’m also disconcerted by those who wear pristine white sneakers that are several years old. Sneakers that have never stepped on anything dirtier than a sidewalk. These folks are dismayed at the thought of walking through horse poop, or God forbid, cow poop, and the notion of wading through such muck to toss some alfalfa hay at the livestock gives them palpitations. Let alone the idea of climbing aboard a horse that might want to buck you off. They can’t imagine why anybody would want to do that.
Since all of my shoes probably have a little dried dung of some sort adhering to them somewhere, and I wade through the dust and/or mud every single day to feed my horses (not to mention I’ve been bucked off more than once in my life), I am in a pretty different space, and my conversations with these folks tend to veer off into mild incomprehension. As in sitting in a room that is perhaps mildly cool, the well dressed lady to the left of me fusses endlessly about the need to turn the heater up, and bundles herself up in her fancy coat and scarf. She looks at me, wearing a light (and very unfancy) sweater and asks, “Aren’t you cold?”
I think about it. I just can’t get my mind around the idea that she thinks this ever so slightly cool room is something to bother about. “Not really,” I say, “it was a lot colder when I was feeding the horses this morning in the rain and wind.” And the thought that goes through my mind is that she needs to try gathering cattle on a blustery day if she wants to know what uncomfortably cold feels like.
I realize that the well dressed ladies of the world probably think I look quite rough and uncouth and they no doubt imagine that I am envious of them, with their high heels, manicured finger nails, shiny little sports cars…etc. But nothing could be farther than the truth. That tidy suburban world holds no allure for me. I like my rough and messy life, full of animals and plants.
As a homeschooling mom, I’ve made many choices concerning what I want my son to learn. I want him to learn to read and write and do math, of course. I want him to learn how the world works. I want him to be able to get along with people…and understand the natural world. I want him to be kind. And I’ve thought a lot about how best to teach him these things.
Currently my son and I go twice a week to a practice roping at my uncle’s small ranch. Here we help gather the cattle out of the pasture and drive them through the chutes. We haze and chase cattle and help the ropers—a group of men ranging from 30 years old to 82. I’ve known these men all my life and used to rope with them, until I gave it up when I got pregnant in my 40’s. But they still treat me like part of the gang.
I don’t agree with them about everything—in fact I disagree with them about lots of things—I would not even bother to discuss politics with them, as we have rather opposite points of view. But I want my son to learn something these men can teach, and most kids don’t get a chance to learn it. To put it simply, I don’t want my son to learn pushy, unkind kid manners from the local suburban soccer team as they play on artificial turf; I want him to learn to be a man among other men. Men who know how to handle horses and cattle, who are in touch with the natural world.
I watch as my boy meets the 82 year old cowboy’s eyes and greets him politely and confidently, “Hey, Burt, how are you?” (And you should see trim, still athletic Burt rope a steer—at 82.) I watch as my child gathers the cattle as part of the team of adults, riding across the big meadow in the sunshine. I watch as he answers promptly, “Yep, I’m ready,” when asked if he’d chase a steer down to the pen for the men. And then he gets the job done. I watch him ride his horse effectively and get a friendly word of praise from 30 year old Mark, who is a handy horse trainer. I watch my kid smile quietly and say “thank you.” My son is learning the cowboy way.
And I believe I am giving him a gift.

What, me? Teach?

Make a living as a writer? Oy.

A crazy idea. I would starve to death in an attic somewhere.

Be a teacher, they told me. It’s good, steady work, respectable, safe—hah!—and, my mother said, “you can write in the summer.”

I was a teenager when we had that conversation, and I knew everything. So even though I had loved many of my teachers, enjoyed talking in front of a class, in fact suspected that I might indeed like teaching, I decided I would never do it. Never. I didn’t want to be safe. I was going to wear a black beret and black tights and a black turtleneck and puff my Pall Malls through a long black cigarette holder. I wasn’t afraid of risk. My writer’s life would be full of danger and excitement.

I wasn’t wrong about that, anyway.

I wanted to write fiction but necessity demanded I do all kinds of writing to support the habit. Journalism. That didn’t work out. Advertising. Lies of all kinds. Hated that.

I finally got published by a major house. And discovered, at various panels and signings, I liked talking about the art of fiction, especially to aspiring novelists. Although I didn’t know much about writing or being a writer, I could help people who knew even less. And they were grateful! When had a vice president in charge of marketing, advertising and pyramid schemes ever said Thank You?

I felt the pull of people who had books in their head. Who oozed creativity and passion, had something to say and were overwhelmed by the need to say it. They had so much to give me. Could I really give something valuable to them? How satisfying it would be.

Hm, I thought. Damned if that doesn’t sound like teaching. Maybe I should give it a try. At first, live classes. Then manuscript consulting. Then the web. Online classes. I love it. I love my students. I write and I teach and so many parts of me are satisfied.

I wish my mother had lived to say I told you so.

Bully Pulpit by Sheila Simonson

Last week, I read a mystery written in the early nineties in which the viewpoint character (first person, a police chief) not only kills three innocent bystanders in the course of bringing a killer to justice but also trashes six of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, or would have, had the story been set in the U.S.  The novel was set in Canada, which has similar protections.  Since it was first person narrative, the reader was apparently supposed to empathize with the cop and even admire him, nor was there any sense that the book was porno-violence aimed at a scofflaw audience.  It was an ordinary, almost traditional mystery, not even particularly noir.  I threw the book at the wall.  I think I may be jurisprudish.

We all know the conventions of the genre.  How many times do we smile and nod as an aristocratic detective of the Golden Age permits a culprit (usually another aristocrat) to go off and commit suicide sooner than face arrest?  The detective is not a cop, so that’s okay.  Right?  One law for the connected, another for the disconnected.  The suicide gambit makes me queasy but doesn’t induce book-throwing.  Still there are limits, even with amateur detectives.

Here’s another example of the felonious sleuth.  I just read the latest in a best-selling, hardcover-in- Costco-and-Walmart series that features a cuddly amateur detective.  This sleuth is not only cuddly, she’s pious, loyal as a Labrador retriever, and endearingly klutzy.  Her cell phone battery is always dead.  She runs out of gas or trips over her galoshes at crucial moments.  She takes apple turnovers to shut-ins.  Lovable is the word.

Now, one problem professional investigators have is getting a search warrant so they can make a case against malefactors.  For a warrant they need evidence that a crime has been committed, but the evidence is locked up in the bad guy’s stronghold.  Frustrating.  So what does the cuddly sleuth of the previous paragraph do?  She sneaks into the villain’s house, breaks into his safe and office files, and steals the relevant evidence.  Fruit of the poisonous tree, you say?  Nonsense.  This cookie makes apple turnovers, remember?  Her boyfriend just happens to be a cop, duly armed, and just happens on the scene in time to blow the villain away as he foolishly objects to being robbed.

I have no quarrel at all with writers portraying bent cops or stupid cops or even vicious cops, and amateur sleuths aren’t bound by the rules of evidence.  What I have trouble with in these books is viewpoint.  The authors have used the first person viewpoint and the agreeable persona of the series sleuth to bully me into applauding acts I would despise in real life.  I detest being bullied.  Anybody else feel that way?

Sheila

Why We Persevere, Part II

(Originally published in slightly different form on the Mysterious Matters blog, 2009)

An old joke goes: The way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a large fortune. We do pay advances to our authors, and my partners and I generally end up with modest profits. The real problem with our bottom line is the number of middlemen who take bites out along the way. By the time a book is in the reader’s hands, it’s gone through several layers of wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. (The way books are shipped back and forth across the country, when you include returns, the people mainly making money from books are UPS, FedEx, and Yellow Freight—in my opinion.) We do need a large distributor for all kinds of reasons, and they take away many headaches in marketing (along with adding others). They represent us to the large wholesalers that bookstores prefer to order through, to bookstores themselves, and even to Amazon.com.

The Internet has been both friend and foe. Competition from online booksellers (along with chains) has probably closed many indie mystery bookstores and mom-and-pop businesses. (We love these stores, which have always given us great support, and couldn’t manage without them.) On the other hand, the online merchandisers have made it possible for any buyer to go online and obtain any book with only a few clicks. Furthermore, anyone can go to our website and view our forthcoming, current, and backlist books, saving us from the ongoing drudgery of print catalogues. (And customers can order directly from us with a discount.) Of course, Amazon’s Kindle, and others have made a whole new kind of reading possible. With steadily increasing sales so far through that medium, we’ll have to wait and see how we’re affected over all by electronic reading of books.

One drawback to the latter is the loss of our talented designer/typesetter’s attractive and meticulously crafted design. The book is just “dumped,” so to speak, into the electronic version. We’ve always taken pride in Eric Larson’s distinctive look for each book, but do readers ever notice? Perhaps subconsciously, I like to think.

Eric is still in Santa Barbara, where everyone else but me was living when we formed our partnership. John and Susan Daniel have moved to Humboldt County in Northern California, and Susan’s marketing/web assistant to San Francisco. I am in Palo Alto, and our distributor, SCB, is in LA. We cover the state, so to speak, and somehow make it work through daily communication by phone, fax, and of course e-mail—without which we couldn’t keep the company going no matter how hard we persevered!

Remembrance of Foliage Past

Easterners who move to Southern California often initially lament that they “miss the change of the seasons.”  My response, which I try not to make too testy, is that we do have a change of seasons. It’s simply different. More subtle, less extreme, and most decidedly not announcing the impending arrival of months of frigid weather.

 In truth, however, the one time of year when I almost regret living where I do is autumn.  The days grow shorter, but with few glorious visuals to accompany the approaching end of another year.  A couple of liquidambar trees in my neighborhood are stunning, but palms and rugged pines are more prevalent in this desert setting than the thirsty giants of my childhood.  Deciduous trees tend to drop their leaves in a brief brown blur. Color? That’s why we grow flowers.

I took autumn for granted as a child in Chicago. 

The suburban neighborhoods of my youth were filled with elms and oaks and maples, all offering radiant fall color and mountains of fallen leaves.  Those leaves had to be raked up, of course, but the reward for blistered palms was a huge curbside bonfire, and the smoke spiraling up as the brittle pile began to burn offered a scent as firmly attached to my memories of childhood as Proust’s Madeleine to his.

 Those childhood elms fell victim to Dutch Elm Disease, and most areas of the country now require that fallen leaves be bagged rather than burned.  Composting is more common than it was in my youth, though I do recall one season when we deposited huge quantities of dead leaves on the far side of the garage to compost.  (I’m pretty sure we never actually used whatever those leaves might have deteriorated into, and that pile may still be there.)

 Time passed and I landed happily in Southern California.

  I heard tales over the years of Autumn in New England, which seemed to be as much a state of mind as a geographical phenomenon, and I studied the pictures with the same detached interest I’d give to Mayan ruins or the Taj Mahal.  Except.  This happened here, in my country, a link to the past I had left behind.

  And so it happened that shortly after delivering our only child to her freshman year of college, my husband and I flew to New Hampshire, from one distant corner of the county to another.  I was writing the Booked for Travel mystery series under the pseudonym Emily Toll, and the third entry in that series, Fall Into Death, would be set in New England in autumn.

 The numerous complications of writing a travel mystery series are more than balanced by the splendid requirement to take some very nice trips in the interest of research.  But one unavoidable  problem is that no matter how much advance research you may do on an area where you have limited personal experience, it’s almost impossible to know how that research will translate into usable material for the book you have in mind.  You need to visit two or three times as many possible settings as will actually make it into the book.  Throw in a limited advance and looming deadlines and you move almost—though not quite—from adventure to chore.

  I discovered, as I began my advance research, that the season known as “peak” varied from one area to another, was tracked by legions of locals reporting in to Yankee Magazine, and depended on a host of factors over which I had no control.  Watching the surf roll onto a San Diego beach, I studied the chemical and biological and geological factors that create or inhibit leaf coloration at the end of a growth year.

 I came to understand that the entire trip would be a visual crapshoot.

Sure enough, in lower New England at first, we saw very little that resembled the calendars and postcards for sale everywhere, though crimson sumac lined most roadways in a taunting reminder that we were missing something mighty amazing.

We scurried from cranberry bogs near Cape Cod (the Edward Gorey house was regrettably closed) to lobster joints on the coast of Maine.  I collected information at marble quarries and Walden Pond and whaling museums.  I toured Orchard House and Lizzie Borden’s place.  With a western sense of distance and insufficient advance respect for the time needed to traverse winding rural roads, I often felt rushed.

But for the most part the trees everywhere remained a rich, vibrant green. I could still write the book, of course, and had plenty of terrific material, but where were the russets and golds, the lemony birches and scarlet maples?  Were we leaf-peepers with nothing to peep at?

Then we drove into northern New Hampshire and Vermont and the magic began. For two glorious days we passed through landscapes that matched or exceeded the pictures I’d been mooning over for months.  I was able to identify a single scarlet tree on an amber hillside as a maple by its shape.  I puzzled over pink-leaved bushes that turned out to be blueberries.  Blueberries!  Who knew?

One stretch alongside a stream was so stunning we drove back thirty miles just so we could travel along it again.  A foggy isolated road that we discovered by accident near a country hotel offered both tantalizing color and drifts of fallen leaves upon its shoulders, and that is the image that comes to mind when I fondly recall the trip.

Yes, there was an autumn in New England, and it was magnificent.

How To Write a Cozy Mystery

—-Lea Wait

So – you want to write a mystery? You don’t know too much about police procedures, or regulations for private detectives, or the law, but you enjoy settling in with a good book in which the bad guys are caught and the good guys (and gals) win out in the end?  Writing a mystery might just be your cup of tea.

Or thimble of arsenic.

Why not try? Traditional mysteries, also known as cozies, are in the Agatha Christie tradition where, it’s often said, “more tea is spilled than blood.” They’ve been popular for decades, and, despite today’s increased popularity of suspense and noir books, are still selling well.

Their readers and authors are predominantly, but not exclusively, women. They even have their own conference, Malice Domestic, held each spring just outside of Washington, D.C., and their own awards: the Agathas, named after you-know-who.

The first book in my Shadows Antique Print Mystery series, Shadows at the Fair, was lucky enough to be a finalist for a “best first mystery “Agatha, forever giving me a place in the traditional mystery world, and giving me some qualifications to give advice about the genre.  So — here goes!

How do you know a mystery fits this sub-genre?

The protagonist of the cozy is usually a woman. She’s not a law-enforcement professional of any kind, although she may have a friend who is. She’s a moderately idiosyncratic adult female who lives a full and active life, has an interesting profession or hobby, and has at least one (preferably more) unresolved personal issue in her life. (An ex-husband who’s a pain, a difficult child, an alcoholic parent;, a secret past. — anything of this sort will do.)  Most important, she has an amazing ability to be in a place where others are murdered — and to always have a logical and justifiable  reason to get involved in solving the crime herself.  (A friend of hers is accused of the murder? The body is on her property? The victim is a business associate? Or former beau?)

Those are the basic components of the cozy. The author (you) still can’t ignore basic rules regarding the relationship between busy- bodies (that’s your protagonist) and law enforcers. You can’t invent forensics, whether CSI does or not. There are books to help you, or, ideally, you can consult with someone in your local police force. State laws vary. And if your case involves the Feds, you’ll need to get that straight. Your readers take their mysteries seriously. They’ll know the rules, and you’d better, too.

You’ll need at least three, but no more than six, possible suspects for your murder or murders (two murders are better than one.)  Each suspect should have MOM.  (A mother is fine, and can even complicate the plot, but in this case we’re talking Motive, Opportunity, and Means.) Your sleuth’s job is to unravel all of that. 

Although a book with a professional crime fighter as protagonist often opens with a body being found, a traditional mystery usually involves you with the characters first. The first murder occurs perhaps 20-30% of the way through the book.

The murder is not described in detail, nor is any sex that might occur.  (Your protagonist doesn’t have to be celibate, but she does have to draw the shades.) If you want to add a second murder, about 60-70% of the way through the book is a good place for that to happen. It also helps keeps the middle of the book going, just about the time you and your readers are feeling a bit bored.

You’ll need an action scene at the end, during which your protagonist will confront the villain, put herself in danger, and, of course the murderer will be caught and all dangling plot ends will be tied off. This should happen very close to the end of the book — a few pages before you turn off your computer.

One more thing. No matter what, no cats or children must die.

Now you’re ready. I’ve shared all the secrets.  All you have to do is write the book.  See you at Malice Domestic next spring!  http://www.malicedomestic.org

We The Jury

A couple of summers ago I received a jury duty summons. On the appointed date and time, I reported to the Alameda County Courthouse in downtown Oakland, near Lake Merritt.

I’d reported for jury duty before, but had never been selected. Or the pool of people called in as potential jurors was dismissed because a jury wasn’t needed after all.

Rene C. Davidson Courthouse, Oakland, California

However, on that day, people crowded into the first-floor jury room were summoned to the courtroom in groups. We were informed that this was a murder trial.

That was the reason for the large jury pool of approximately a hundred-fifty citizens. In a series of jury interviews to be held the following week, the pool would be winnowed down to twelve jurors and three alternates.

When we returned to the jury room we were given a long questionnaire to fill out. Those who felt that they had a good reason for not serving on the jury were told they would have the opportunity that afternoon to discuss their situations with the Superior Court judge presiding over the trial.

I have no objection to serving on a jury. I feel it’s my duty as a citizen. But I’d never had the opportunity before. As I filled out the questionnaire, I thought my status as a writer of crime fiction would disqualify me.

But I made the first cut and found myself in the group of approximately seventy-five potential jurors called back the following week for jury interviews.

The judge informed us that this was not a case where the jury would determine who killed the victim. One of the defendants, a young man, had indeed confessed to killing the victim, another young man.

The jury’s job was to determine whether this killing was murder in the first or second degree, or whether it was manslaughter, voluntary or involuntary. The jury would also determine whether the second defendant, an older man, was an accessory to this crime. There were various other charges against both men, involving possession of firearms, since both defendants had prior felony convictions.

Listening to the jury interviews was interesting and revealing. Some people felt that anyone charged with murder must surely be guilty of murder and that was that. Others revealed prejudices and biases that led to their disqualification. Many felt that they could be open and unbiased, making their decision on the basis of the evidence presented during the trial, despite the fact that many of the witnesses, as we were warned, had various misdemeanor and felony convictions.

When my turn came for the interview, the first thing the judge remarked on was my status as mystery writer. He asked questions about my ability to sift fact from fiction and used this as a springboard for comments about how this wasn’t an episode of Law and Order. One of the defense attorneys asked if this case would wind up in one of my books. My answer was frank, and truthful. I told the court that everything that occurs in my life is grist for the mill, and I might very well use my juror experiences in fiction.

That was the point at which I was sure I’d wind up on the jury. I was right. For the next five weeks, three to four days per week depending on the judge’s schedule, I was in that courtroom, listening to witnesses, or in the jury room upstairs with my fellow jurors, where we were under strict orders not to discuss the case.

My stint as a juror made a lasting impression on me. At the start I thought the case was going to be straightforward, another senseless killing in a rough Oakland neighborhood. But it wasn’t that simple.

I listened to the testimony of witnesses who contradicted each other, making an effort to determine who was telling the truth. I got a sobering picture of the aimless lives of many of the people involved in this case.

Then there were the crime scene photos. Those images will stay with me. They showed the damage done to a human body by a semi-automatic weapon fired a close range.

We the jury – we took our job very seriously. We were aware that we held in our hands the fate of these two defendants.

When the case went to the jury, we spent five days deliberating and discussing the evidence. The jury instructions given to us by the judge became our Bible. We figured all the information we needed was there, if only we could parse it out.

In order to come back with a verdict of first-degree murder, we had to answer yes to a set of questions. If one of the answers was no, then we were at a verdict of second-degree murder, which had its own set of questions.

If one of those parameters wasn’t met, we were then to a verdict of voluntary manslaughter. Paramount to all of this was the instruction that if we had any reasonable doubt, the defendant should be considered innocent of that charge.

None of this was easy, or cut-and-dried. That’s why it took us nearly four days to come to agreement on the first count for the first defendant. Once we had that, the other counts fell into place.

The verdict? In the case of the first defendant, guilty of voluntary manslaughter and several other charges. Later that year, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison. The second defendant: not guilty of the accessory to murder charge, guilty of several other charges.