CRIME ON MY MIND

Catching up on spooking things...

Had I been writing the Tuesday blog, the day after Halloween, I would have asked how your evening went? Lots of little goblins and faeries at your door? Kids really love the whole concept of dressing up and getting tons of treats.

Who wouldn't? In fact, I know a lot of adults that revert right back to their inner child on this night. There were lots of costumed parents keeping track of their kids on the prowl as well as many who stayed at home, also in full costume, to dish out the treats.

There's also the thrill factor that goes along with Halloween. The spine-tingling moment of coming face-to-face (although what you're facing may not be a face) with some freaked-out creature from your wildest nightmare. Most kids -- and adults -- love being scared out their minds. Note the proliferation of movies -- Halloween III, Fright Night, xxx. Not my idea of a good time but I just might be in the minority.

Have you noticed recent trends in novels, too? Vampires are hot stuff and appear in all types of genres. From the Twilight set to Sookie Stackhouse to Buffy, the

Vampire Slayer...these books are everywhere. In the mystery section you'll find such authors as Charlaine Harris, Kay Hooper, and Kim Harrison. These writers have been among the trend-setters, pumping out tales of vampires and the such for several years now.

These psychic sleuths have even appeared in the traditionally lighter cosy lines with authors such as Victoria Laurie and Juliet Blackwell.

And who's reading them? All age groups it seems. I'm not sure what this means. Are psychological thrillers not thrilling enough? Do we need an infusion of the unnatural to figuratively scare us to death? I also don't get the popularity of reality TV shows, but that's another story.

When I first went into the bookstore business, historical mysteries were hot and continued to be for many, many years. I noticed the inclusion of supernatural titles in catalogues, gradually building in numbers over the seasons. What I didn't realize was just how popular they would become. But, here they are.

So, what's the next trend going to be? Can you foresee it?


Linda Wiken/Erika Chase
A Killer Read coming April 3, 2012
from Berkley Prime Crime

LADIES' KILLING THURSDAYS

What to do when you’re not doing anything?

By ‘anything’ I mean writing. Having made a rash and irrational decision to split my time between two cities I’ve been amassing the goods and chattels for the second home. Incidentally, it’s amazing, or at least it was amazing to me as a want to be minimalist, that when I went through my house I found all kinds of things I could do without. Now I have much tidier cupboards and a pile of ‘stuff’ to go to the new place.

But, while I was doing all this searching, making mental lists, scurrying around and even buying some new things I wasn’t doing anything on a new novel that’s been limping along. What to do?

Writing is writing and it was time to produce my contribution to the Mystery Maven blog. That got me sitting in front of my computer and reading the blogs I’d missed while I focussed on domestic regrouping.

Rick Blechta’s generosity in sharing the details of his venture into the world of rapid readers was inspiring. These books provide an interesting challenge and are certainly valuable if they introduce reluctant or newly minted readers to the pleasures of reading.

Besides Rick Blechta other well known mystery writers like Gail Bowen and Barbara Fradkin have written for the series. If I hadn’t previously known about the restrictions I would not have noticed them in the two that I’ve read. Both books moved along at a good clip and had unexpected surprise endings. It would be interesting to know from Orca how this series has been received. In today’s rapidly paced world novellas may have a wider market than Orca first thought.

These books along with many others deserve a wider audience. Mary Jane Maffini, writing about the decline in mystery book reviewers and the shortness of time a book has to make an impact made the case for becoming involved. We must use the media at our disposal to praise the books we enjoy. The internet is going to replace the book store owner or employee who hand sells a book or an author. We are going to have to find the appropriate venues and do the job ourselves.

Venturing further back I enjoyed Sue Pike’s passionate plea for libraries and librarians. Recently the Toronto CBC has focussed on how much young people who do not have computers in their homes need the libraries and how this will continue to be a problem as the gap widens between those who have access to the latest technology and those who don’t. Think too of the children who come to groups to enjoy having librarians read to them. For some children who have no books at home or parents whose first language is not English they are only read to at day care or at the library and as a society we need them to love books.

Now that I’ve enjoyed a trip back through the blog I’m inspired. It’s time to drag the embryonic novel out and see what can be done to it.




Joan Boswell is a member of the Ladies Killing Circle and co-edited four of their short story anthologies: Fit toDie, Bone Dance, Boomers Go Bad and Going Out With a Bang. Her three mysteries, Cut Off His Tale, Cut to the Quick and Cut and Run were published in 2005, 2006 and 2007. In 2000 she won the $10,000 Toronto Star’s short story contest. Joan lives in Toronto with three flat-coated retrievers.

WICKED WEDNESDAYS

AArghh!

Getting a late start on this today. I've been driven crazy by my keyboard. It's one of those extra features ones and it started making strange noises and deciding it was time for a much slower pace. Of course, the instructions that came with say nothing about this malady. So, I went on-line. Not listed in the usual questions section.

But in order to ask a question -- you got it! You need a keyboard!!!!

So, I went out and bought a new one this a.m. If I ever figure out why my old one is on strike and we get past the mediation part, I'll keep it as a spare. But old pet peeves have surfaced because of this.

It's my deeply-buried resentment of all electrical items. Because they eventually fail. And it's ALWAYS when you need them to be at their prime at that immediate moment. Electric car windows, photocopiers, toasters, and now, keyboards. The list is really endless. How did we get to this state?

I went into withdrawal not being able to write this blog nor answer email this morning. Oh sure, I could have reached out to someone using my Rogers phone but I don't have a long distance plan. I use email instead. Looks like that needs to be re-visited.

Also, I'm on deadline here, keyboard. I have to send the copyedited version of my book back to my editor by tomorrow. THIS IS NOT A GOOD TIME to abandon me. Remember

the days of typing out the manuscript at a Remington typewriter? Using the 'cut & paste' method when editing? Okay, it was not fun having to stuff the entire 300 pages in a brown manila envelope, along with a SASE, to mail off to a publisher. Costly, too.

I'll grudgingly admit that electronics do play a valid role in our busy lives. Or, are our lives so busy because of 'time saving' electronics? Who knows? Who cares? I have a new keyboard and I have email that needs to be answered!


Linda Wiken/Erika Chase
A Killer Read coming April 3, 2012
from Berkley Prime Crime

TUESDAY BRINGS TROUBLE

Something arrived in my mailbox in July of 2010 that knocked me for a loop. A publisher had actually contacted me to inquire if I’d be interested in writing a book for a new series they were planning. To say the least, I was overjoyed – and humbled.

The publisher is Orca and the series is Rapid Reads, a line of books for those with literacy challenges (include ESL in there), reluctant readers (that teenage son of yours, for instance) or for those who need a quick mystery fix when they have some waiting to do like for a doctor’s appointment or a short plane ride.

However, the commission came with some pretty strict marching orders: no more than 20,000 words, a simple plot with little or no use of flashbacks or sub plots, easy vocabulary (Grade 4-5), basic sentence structure and not many characters. Hmmm... I can easily write chapters in excess of 4000 words, just for a starter. A different manner of working was called for.

I spent about two months hatching my plot. My proposal was quickly accepted and I set to work. Since what they called for was a radical departure from my usual novels where musicians and the world they inhabit take centre stage, I decided to write something that was even more of a departure. I still kept music front and centre in the setting, but I decided to write a police procedural with two homicide

detectives as the protagonists. Two months later, the result was Orchestrated Murder – which made its debut on book shelves this October 1st. The story’s basic premise is that someone has murdered a famous conductor, and by time the cops get on the scene, the entire orchestra has confessed. So instead of a few suspects as in most mysteries, Pratt and Ellis have to deal with 76!

To any who might decide to travel down this writing road, I have a few suggestions. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be, but I did make some mistakes that maybe I can help you step around. No sense falling into the same holes I did.

First, don’t try to take a plot that you might use for a full-length novel and try to “cut it down to size”. There’s something inherently different in writing a novel, in much the same way that a short story is also different. For these novellas, you need a plot that’s simple in the first place, not as an after thought.

Forget any character development of the sort you can get away with in a novel. You can develop your characters, but it must be development via “hit and run”: do it in dialogue, little sprinkles of description about a character’s body language, things like that. And remember, every time you do this, you’re chewing up that word allowance!

My method of starting my day’s writing is to read (and correct/refine) what I wrote the day before. I find it helps me get into the right headspace quickly and easily. For this novel, I would often go through the previous day’s work, mumbling things like, “Three syllables for that word. What was I thinking?” or “That’s definitely the wrong sentence for this book. It has three clauses!” Often I just muttered to myself. If you work in this fashion, use your warm-up period to chuck the things that snuck in the previous day when you weren’t looking. It happens surprisingly easily.

The most important thing Orca told me about their Rapid Reads is that they only accepted “good stories, well told”, so even if it was simple, I couldn’t just throw anything down on the page and expect it to fly with them. This is where I really struggled. I mean, this is minimalist writing of a kind I’d never attempted. In the end, I was surprised in how much I really enjoyed the whole process. Writing with such tight restrictions was actually quite liberating. I really had to think about every single thing I put down. There were no slam dunks in this game!

Rick Blechta is the author of seven crime novels, including Orchestrated Murder and next fall’s full-length novel, The Fallen One (from Dundurn Press), which is all about an opera singer who might be seeing ghosts. His 2005 novel, Cemetery of the Nameless, was a finalist in the Best Novel category for the Arthur Ellis Awards. He’s also a musician and currently plays in an 18-piece big band called The Advocats (It has a lot of lawyers in it.) and does any other gig that comes his way. Find out about all of this at www.rickblechta.com. Rick also blogs every Tuesday on www.typem4murder.blogspot.com and on the subject of baseball every Saturday at www.lateinnings.blogspot.com.

MAYHEM ON MONDAYS

What to do if you love a book

You may ask, why do anything at all? After all, does any book need a boost from you? Ah. Allow me to climb up on my soapbox. You should do something because that book most likely needs your friendly assistance. These days there are fewer and fewer physical bookstores and consequently not nearly enough places where you can walk in and see an array of books in front of you. We are increasingly using online sources to find books. But first we need to know something about that book in order to find it: the title, the author’s name, some category or key word. It’s not quite the same as checking out shelves and tables in a bookstore.

The books that will automatically flash in front of your face are either the ones that have sold the most or those where the publisher has invested in site advertising.

Even in the larger ‘real’; bookstore, the endcaps and special displays are funded as advertising by publishers. That’s a business decision in a free country.
However, so many other books are shy flowers with three months to be purchased or stripped, cover returned to the publisher and the body of the book in the dumpster. If they happen to be on a bottom shelf because of the vagaries of shelving and number, they may be more like weeds to be trampled. Top shelf isn’t much better from my viewpoint, but of course, I am five feet tall. The whole scenario is enough to make a reader or author feel faint.

Then there’s the fact that print review sources are shrinking. That means more attention for the ‘big books’ that you can’t miss anyway, less for the others. Look for full page reviews of the megasellers and no page reviews for most of the midlist. Too bad, so sad.

Even libraries, long the treasured location for creative and serendipitous browsing, are not immune to this. Many of us, including grouchy little me, use the online catalogue to select titles and dash in to pick up my selection without checking to see what else is available. Of course, they are titles or authors that I already know about.

Plus more and more books don’t even have a physical manifestation: they’re e-books or they’re downloadable audio books. How do you find out about them?

So that’s my point: if you love a book that is not an international bestseller or a major frontlist baby for a huge publisher, then tell people about it. It will feel the love! Here are some things you could consider. They’re all free and most only take a minute!

Tell your reading friends.
Tell your local librarians.
Tell a bookstore owner.
Tell your book club.
Tell strangers on a bus.
Be seen with the book! Read it in the doctor’s waiting room, on a plane, in a slow grocery line. Someone’s bound to ask. But feel free to volunteer the information.


Don’t get out much? No problem!
Tell your Facebook buddies.
Tell your Twitter followers.
Link to a nice review.
Comment on the author’s blog or Facebook page.
Every one of these takes almost no time. A minute. Or a quick flap of the tongue. But in this networked world any one can make a difference.

Have a few more minutes? Write a quick review online or rate the book on an online site or online bookseller. You won’t just be dishing out stars. You’ll be one!

Lastly: Tell the author. Most authors have a website with a contact email. It’s a lonely old world out there and it could get lonelier with all these invisible books, bookstores closing and shrinking book review sections. So give an author a boost! Every author writes with the reader in mind. Without the reader, the story doesn’t matter. If you’re a happy reader, let the person know that their book touched you in some way.



Mary Jane Maffini rides herd on three (soon to be three and a half) mystery series and a couple of dozen short stories. Her thirteenth mystery novel, The Busy Woman’s Guide to Murder, which hit the bookshelves last week, is brimming with names, no two the same.

MYSTERY REVIEW

Sitting Lady Sutra
By Kay Stewart
Touchwood Editions

RCMP Constable Danutia Dranchuk makes her second appearance in this new novel by Kay Stewart. The first one, A Deadly Little List, which Stewart co-authored with husband Chris Bullock, saw Const. Dranchuk, recently graduated from the academy. Now she’s stationed in Victoria, B.C. and recently named Special Investigator in trying to find a serial killer before more women are murdered.

The Sitting Lady of the title is the name of a waterfall just outside the city. It’s where the body of a teenaged girl is found after six months of decay. Nobody has reported her missing. Is she just one of many lost souls or a victim of Handy Dan, the nickname of the serial killer Dranchuk is tracking. Until that can be established, she must cooperate with Corporal Farrell from the West Shore division, not a happy situation for either woman.

Dranchuck works closely with Corporal Surinder Sharma, head of forensics, in searching for both the identity of the girl and her killer. His timely words of wisdom and quiet relentless methods help Dranchuk to focus her own skills. She’s invited to his home to celebrate Thanksgiving and the Hindu festival of Dussehra, where she meets his two sons and niece, an art student who has been estranged from the family for many years. The Sharma family stories and traditions weave a colourful texture into this police procedural. And we learn about the tragedy that beset the family decades ago in Toronto. But Dranchuk eventually has questions about Sharma’s handling of the case. She feels he’s dragging his feet but doesn’t know why.

Dranchuk’s own past becomes part of the story as she tries to deal with a secret from her youth.

The setting also plays a major role in the mystery. From Victoria’s bustling city streets to the haunting forests and wild streams of Witty’s Lagoon Regional Park, Stewart is a great travel guide and paints a vivid picture of this soulful place.

Sitting Lady Sutra is a well-written mystery with a solid plot and sub-plots that intertwine and surprise. Stewart knows how to write a compelling novel with dialogue that is sharp and believable, as are the characters. It’s always a pleasure to find a strong female protagonist who is also good at her job. Danutia Dranchuk is definitely one.

CRIME ON MY MIND

And now for something completely different.

I’ve been known to get hooked on the occasional TV series and with the fall season in full swing, I’m wondering which ones are your favourite crime-related series. It’s a question my writing buddies have been tossing around lately, mainly looking for recommendations.


I’ll put mine out there – Harry’s Law, Castle, Prime Suspect, Body of Proof. They each have their flaws, of course. I much preferred Harry’s Law last year when it was a small law firm doing business in a shoe store. But the actors are strong and I still love Harry in the courtroom.

Castle seemed to have lost its way at the end of last season but may be back on track. It’s the sexy tension between Castle and Beckett that sets this one apart but it can get bogged down in backstory.

Prime Suspect is a great title but in no way relates to the British namesake. Which is too bad. Not that it’s not an Americanized version, like we saw with Cracker, but more because that’s what you expect when you purloin a well-known title. Put all that aside and you have a strong female cop. I like her style. Okay…maybe the tension in the squad room diffused much too soon. That rivalry made the show sizzle. But it still has my attention.

Finally, Body of Proof, partly because I love the shoes. And of course, the female medical examiner and her boss dress more like fashion models. And not since Quincy have we seen a pathologist-cum-police detective at work. She spends as much time physically chasing down suspects as in the lab. So, suspend your disbelief and enjoy. It’s still an entertaining hour.

Of course, there are others that drift onto and off my ‘must watch’ list, depending on availability. Bring on a new season of New Tricks, and I’m there. Same with Republic of Doyle. And then we have those short British series – Inspector Lewis just keeps getting better. And I find Case Histories, based on Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, well worth watching.

Which brings to mind the question of transition between a book and the screen. I think the best done were the Benny Cooperman movies based on Howard Engel’s lovable PI. Wallander fell short when the main character sported a British rather than a Swedish accent. Sorry – I do demand some realism.

Some, ‘based on characters’ of series written by mystery authors stand the test of a long run, such as the Morse mysteries. Others, like Midsomer Murders, can get boring but did revive last season and were interesting once again.

What’s on your ‘must-watch’ list? And, which book series would you like to see transformed into TV series? What about your own books?


Linda Wiken/Erika Chase
A Killer Read coming April 3, 2012
from Berkley Prime Crime