In Reference to Murder

Author R&R with Jake Needham

Hong Kong Magazine called Jake Needham "probably the best known American writer almost nobody in America has ever heard of." They might well be right. The four Asian crime novels he has published up until now (The Ambassador's Wife, Killing Plato, Laundry Man and The Big Mango) have sold nearly 150,000 copies in Asia, Europe and the UK, but not a single copy has ever appeared on any bookstore shelf in the US or Canada. His fifth novel, A World of Trouble, was published this week, but it won't be sold in the U.S. either.

Fortunately for readers who enjoy international crime novels, Jake's publisher has recently released all of his novels worldwide for Kindle, Nook, and iBooks. And, for the first time, Americans are beginning to discover Jake Needham, too. You can learn more about Jake and read excerpts from his books at his website.

Jake stopped by In Reference to Murder to take part in the ongoing feature "Author R&R" (Reference and Research), offering up these fascinating insights:

 

I write international crime novels set in contemporary Asia. They're filled with a collection of colorful rogues who range from the merely raffish to the downright scary: criminals on the lam, politicians on the take, intelligence agents on the grift, and hustlers on the scam.

Yeah, I know. You probably didn't realize there were any crime novels set in contemporary Asia, did you? You've read American crime novels, British crime novels, Italian crime novels, Scandinavian crime novels, and Russian crime novels, but…uh, Asian crime novels? I have to tell you, the few of us out there publishing Asian crime novels these days pretty much think of ourselves as the Rodney Dangerfield's of popular fiction.

Authenticity is important to me and I work hard at maintaining it in my books. Of all the reviews I've had over the years, both in the press and from individual readers, I am proudest of those that talk about the feel of my books and how real they make contemporary Asia seem for readers. "Needham certainly knows where some bodies are buried," Asia Inc Magazine said about my books. Darn right. I helped bury some of them.

I've lived in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok for nearly twenty-five years now so my research these days consists primarily of a lot of pretty energetic hanging out. Let me give you an example.

I've been thinking a lot about doing a novel set in Macau so a few weeks ago I flew to Hong Kong, took a hydrofoil across the Pearl River estuary, and checked into the Grand Lisboa on the edge of the old city in Macau. I've been going to Macau for nearly thirty years, but the place has changed so much – and continues to change every year with such terrifying speed – that I wanted to walk the streets again and renew my feel for it.

Now I know quite a few people in Macau, and they know a lot more people in Macau. Generally, I find people like to talk to novelists, particularly if we come recommended as reliable by people they trust. We're not journalists. We're not trying to dig some dirt and turn it into a front-page story that might make our career even if it ends somebody else's. What we care about is how things might be, not how they really are. After all, we write fiction. We make this stuff up, don't we?

So here are some of things I did in Macau…

A retired MI6 intelligence officer who is now involved with casino security operations bought me dinner at the Wynn Macau and told me stories about the Triads involvement in the gambling industry there. As we were finishing our steaks, a major figure in one of Macau's largest triads dropped by the table and had coffee with us.

I drank San Miguel with a retired CIA officer in a little bar down in the old waterfront district, although in this case I have my doubts about the 'retired' part. He told me quite a lot about the life of Kim Jong-Nam, the eldest son of Kim Jong-Il now living quietly in Macau. Early the next morning, we climbed a narrow dirt path along the bluffs in Coloane and looked down into the house where Kim Jong-Nam lives.

I walked the narrow streets of the old city from the Chinese border to the outer harbor with an Australian who is an old Asia hand if there ever was one. He knows more about what is going on under the surface in Macau than I have a hope in hell of ever using in any book.

I ate Portuguese food in a tiny restaurant near the ferry terminal with a Chinese lawyer who represents a lot of people I have absolutely no intention of mentioning. He told me the real story of the North Korean bank that had for a decade been laundering counterfeit American currency into the international banking system through Macau.

And one night I sat all by myself in a half-empty bar at the top of the Old Lisboa casino, shooing away Russian hookers and remembering when I had shaken hands with King Sihanouk of Cambodia in that very room some thirty-five years before, back in a time when the Khmer Rouge had taken over Cambodia and Sihanouk was running for his life.

That's what I mean by 'hanging out' and calling it research. Hey, do I have the best job in the world, or what?

My new novel, A World of Trouble, is about Thailand on the brink of a civil war, its wealthy former prime minister now living in splendid exile in Dubai, and his American lawyer caught between two worlds. It's now available worldwide for Kindle and Nook, and through Smashwords. It will soon be available for iBooks, too.

Please visit my web site and read my Letters from Asia for more about my books and my life along the fault lines of modern Asia.

Author R&R with Jane Cleland

This week's "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) guest is Jane K. Cleland, who received an MFA in Playwriting and currently teaches in the writing programs at several colleges, as well as conducting writing workshops. Jane is also the author of the Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series (set in Rocky Point, a small town on the rugged coast of New Hampshire) that has been called "an Antiques Roadshow for mystery fans." 

The latest installment in the series, Dolled Up for Murder, was just released last week, and centers on a doll collection that someone finds valuable enough to resort to kidnapping and murder. Jane offered up the following tidbits on how she went about researching the book:

To research dolls for the seventh Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery, DOLLED UP FOR MURDER, I consulted websites, doll collectors, antiques dealers, and vendors at doll shows. I tried to learn why some dolls are appealing while others aren’t. What I learned is that the definition of beauty is individual, subjective, and idiosyncratic. No doubt you know that old saying… that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Well, it’s the same with dolls. One girl’s favorite is another girl’s, ummm, not so much. That said, here’s what I learned and what I concluded.

Dolls are a reflection of the makers’ views of people, of how they look to them, or of how they want them to look. Dolls reflect someone’s image of reality or idealized beauty.

The concept of idealized beauty is on the minds of many people at the college where I teach—LIM College in New York City. The school’s tag line is “Where business meets fashion.” My students are pursuing careers in the business side of the fashion industry.

In my classes, we’ve considered how the concept of idealized beauty has changed from da Vinci’s time, when the definition of beauty was based on proportion and symmetry, to now where it’s based on size and shape. We’ve talked about the power of the media in determining what people perceive as beautiful, and how governments, for instance, Spain, now regulate it. And we’ve talked about dolls, and how little girls determine what they should look like based on the dolls they play with. For instance, we’ve seen how Barbie is constructed in an anatomically impossible way. How if her proportions were transferred to a real person, she’d meet the medical definition of anorexic. Barbie was introduced in 1959, but this issue has been around for as long as dolls have been around. To look at dolls is to witness society’s definition of beauty at any moment in time.

There is a category of dolls known as Queen Anne dolls. It is extraordinarily unusual to see a doll that dates from earlier than1850, so even though Queen Anne’s reign ended in 1714, dolls that meet two parameters are known as “Queen Anne” dolls. First, they’re crafted of wood dating from before 1850; second, they look like adults. Most early dolls were—and most dolls still are—crafted to look like children. Dolls from the 17^th and 18^th century that look like adults are among the rarest of finds, and thus the most valuable. In excellent condition, they’re nearly priceless. I learned all this from talking to sellers of dolls. It’s interesting, but what really captivated my imagination was trying to understand how and why these dolls came to be.

Think of the 18^th century doll maker. He’s a cabinetmaker, probably, not just a carpenter. In other words, he’s a specialist… you’ll note, by the way, that it’s safe for me to say he’s a man because at that time essentially all carpenters and cabinetmakers were men… when I say he’s a specialist, that means he’s adept at using his tools. He didn’t just nail boards together; he crafted ornate finials and ornamental door pulls, work that required skill and finesse and dedication. It was these men who fabricated the dolls we refer to as Queen Anne dolls. He crafted them out of hard wood, carving faces so realistic you can’t believe the images aren’t real, adding paint to highlight her lips and eyes and suggest the color and curl of her hair. As a writer researching these dolls, I want to know more. I want to know which women these Queen Anne dolls are based on. Is she modeled on the maker’s wife? The girl who got away? The girl of his dreams? The woman he hopes his daughter becomes?

I can’t ever know, of course, but I can gather additional clues by considering what she’s wearing. So I began analyzing doll’s clothing. Is her clothing constructed out of silk? Or scraps of cotton? Is she wearing a traditional, festive costume, part of a celebration, perhaps? Or is she dressed for work, in peasant garb? As Mark Twain once wrote, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have no influence on society.” Fair enough. But is it a man, the maker, who dressed those girls and women? We can’t know. We do know that starting in the mid-19^th century, European doll makers used porcelain and leather to craft dolls that integrated modern technology. Some of these dolls could play music and eat or drink. Amazing! We also know that sometimes these dolls were drafted into occupations their makers never intended—smuggling.

Given that I write murder mysteries, you can imagine how my ears perked up at that. I knew that I wanted the pivotal antique to be dolls, but until I studied the world of smuggling dolls, I didn’t have a plot.

Here’s an example of what I learned. There’s a Civil War-era doll named Nina who, it seems, came to America from Europe with her papier mâché head filled with morphine or quinine, an effort orchestrated by Southern sympathizers to get medical supplies past the Union blockade and into the hands of sick Confederate soldiers. Nina lives in the Museum of the Confederacy, in Richmond, Virginia, which holds the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Confederacy. Nina hid medical supplies. Knowing that got me thinking about what else could be hidden in dolls’ heads or in their hollowed out legs, or under their clothing, strapped to their little bodies. Jewels, perhaps, or illegal drugs, or military secrets… or who knows what else.

Dolls of all kinds have been used for smuggling for as long as dolls have existed, and smuggling itself has been going on for even longer than that. I am a realist, so I get it. If you have something to smuggle, you want to find something that’s not likely to attract attention. I may understand the smuggler’s motivation, but to my mind, there’s something especially distasteful about using dolls for illicit purposes. Dolls represent innocence, or should. When a drug dealer or a spy or a thief use dolls to stash contraband, it isn’t merely breaking the law. It’s a betrayal of innocence.

And that’s the genesis of the plot of DOLLED UP FOR MURDER.

Thanks to Jane for participating and offering up insights and a behind-the-scenes look at her novel. To read an excerpt from this seventh installment of what Library Journal calls a "winning cozy series," just follow this link.

Author R&R: Carolyn Hart

Author Carolyn G. Hart was born in Oklahoma City "where the sun almost always shines and the wind almost always blows." She first used Oklahoma as a background in "Spooked," published in the anthology Murder on Route 66, which tells the story of a 12-year-old girl in a northeastern Oklahoma town during World War II. Carolyn has always been inspired by strong, courageous women and often features such characters in her writing. Fellow author Nancy Pickard named Carolyn the heir apparent to the Grand Dame of the traditional mystery novel, Agatha Christie.

Carolyn has authored 46 published novels, including a series featuring one of the literary world's only ghost detectives, Bailey Ruth Raeburn, and another with retired newswoman Henrie O. Collins. But her most popular continues to be the Death on Demand series, so named because the protagonist, Annie Laurance, sells books in her small town bookstore named Death on Demand. Annie also "solves murders with equal flair," says Library Journal, which called the first installment in the series a "library essential." Carolyn's mystery awards include the Agatha, Anthony and Macavity, and a standalone WWII novel was nominated for the Putlitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University.

Next week (April 3), the 22nd Death on Demand book, Death Comes Silently, is being released by Berkley, in which Annie and her husband Max try to piece together a puzzle involving an overturned kayak, a stolen motorboat, a troubled love affair and a reckless teenager, and how they all tie in to the murder of Annie's friend, Gretchen Burkholt.

In celebration of her new release, Carolyn stopped by In Reference to Murder to discuss her thoughts on "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) in writing novels:

Research is just another word for the excitement of learning facts I didn’t know. Sometimes the facts are exciting, sometimes amazing, sometimes chilling. Books can require everything from intensive investigation to simple fact checking.

In Death Comes Silently, the 22nd in the Death on Demand series, I needed to know about Personal Flotation Devices, hypothermia, and alternative energy sources. I discovered that the support of a PFDs isn’t sufficient if the swimmer is in cold water that causes hypothermia. When the swimmer loses consciousness, the head falls forward and the swimmer drowns despite remaining buoyant. I can’t say more about alternative energy because it would tip a canny reader (and there are no readers cannier than mystery readers) to the solution.

Because I have been writing for so many years about a sea island off the coast of South Carolina in the Death on Demand series, I have an extensive collection of books about the South Carolina Low Country. In past titles I have shared these (to me) fascinating facts:

• Alligators can outrun a fast man for fifty yards.
• The Golden Silk spider can spin a thirty-foot wide web in a tree. 
• Spanish moss is not a parasite, but an air plant which simply hangs from live oaks but causes them no damage.
• Poisonous cottonmouth snakes can drape themselves in trees to surprise the unwary.
• That thrashing in the underbrush may be a wild boar.
• To survive a riptide, swim with current until the force eases and the swimmer can turn back toward shore. 
• Palmettos are the state tree of South Carolina.
• The breeze is onshore during daytime, off shore at night.

When writing, I try to give readers a sense of the island’s essence, the smell of saltwater or marsh, the humidity in summer, the forest inhabitants including cougars, bobcats, wild boars, alligators, and snakes, and the magnificent live oaks, longleaf pines, and cypress.

In the past, I have written books prompted by my interest in World War II. I was a child during the war years and as a young adult read extensively about the war. That reading provided the basis for two of my early suspense novels, Escape from Paris and Brave Hearts.

The complete and original manuscript of Escape from Paris was published in fall 2011. It is the story of two American sisters who help British RAF fliers escape from the Nazis after the fall of France. The Gestapo sets a trap and on the bleak Christmas Eve of 1940, death is only a step behind. The research entailed reading books published after the war that gave personal accounts of Paris during the Occupation.

I was also very interested in the experiences of Americans in the Philippines. I did extensive research about the nurses on Corregidor. I wanted to write a non-fiction book but the papers of the nurses weren’t open then for public inspection. (Since then, a superb non-fiction book has been published about American nurses captured by the Japanese: We Band of Angels by Elizabeth M. Norman.) Instead, I used the material to write Brave Hearts, which is scheduled to be reprinted. Brave Hearts recounts the desperate efforts of a band of Americans who escape from Corregidor.

Just as readers learn from the novels they enjoy, writers explore present and past to create characters who become for a while a part of particular worlds. Sometimes it’s fun as in my Death on Demand and Bailey Ruth books.

The Death on Demand books are set in a mystery bookstore and afford a happy reason to read lots and lots of mysteries.

Bailey Ruth is a redheaded ghost who returns to earth to help someone in trouble. When I finished the first book, Ghost at Work, I asked my favorite priest to read it to be sure I hadn’t made some egregious error about the Episcopal Church. His response: "Well, Carolyn, until Edward R. Murrow returns with a first-hand account, your version of Heaven is as valid as anyone's." I thought that was very generous of him.

So writers are always looking for information. Sometimes the knowledge is simply intriguing or interesting. Sometimes research is sad and gripping as in the WWII novels. Whatever we learn adds depth and resonance to what we write and makes our own world larger.

More Forensics and Fiction

D.P. Lyle was born and raised in Alabama, attended medical school in Texas, and for the past 30 years has practiced cardiology in Orange County, California. Along the way, Dr. Lyle became an expert on forensics in fiction.

Lyle has advised many novelists and consuled on television shows such as Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Cold Case, House, Women's Murder Club and The Glades. He's also an in-demand speaker, giving talks on "Plotting the Perfect Murder" and "Understanding the Science of Crime."

His talks and consulting gigs prompted him to write several nonfiction books, including Howdunit: Forensics (part of the Writer's Digest series for authors) and Forensics for Dummies, an Edgar-nominee and Macavity winner in 2005. He also started a book series using questions from writers along with his answers. The first was Murder and Mayhem in 2003, followed by Forensics and Fiction in 2007. These two books were so well-received, it spawned a third book in the series, More Forensics and Fiction, due in bookstores on April 1st.

The latest book (subtitled "Crime Writers Morbidly Curious Questions Expertly Answered") is a collection of 180 new questions from novelists and screenwriters. As Dr. Lyle notes, "The hope with each of these books is that writers will find them educational and inspirational. I hope some of the questions and answers spark that little question What If? and from that new stories emerge. I think seeing what other writers are doing and what they are thinking and how they are going about constructing their stories sometimes offers that spark."

The questions are those you'd expect from a crime fiction writer, but not for the squeamish, such as "What does the victim of an arrow to the heart look like, and how would he die?", "What injuries can result from depleted uranium bullets?", "Will snake venom injected into fruit cause death?", and "What happens when someone swallows razor blades?" (We crime writers are a morbid lot...)

As author P. J. Parrish says in his praise of the book, it's a "must-have for any crime writer struggling to come up with an original and exciting way to commit murder."  I would add that it's a micro-forensics class in a book, with the author revealing such helpful tidbits as the 12-12-12 rigor mortis rule (i.e., rigor develops over 12 hours, stays 12 hours, then resolves over 12 hours).

Questions are divided into broad sections, beginning with Part I, Traumatic Injuries, Illnesses, Doctors and Hospitals. Part II includes Poisons, Toxins, Medications and Drugs; Part III covers The Police, the Crime Scene and the Crime Lab; Part IV involves questions about The Coroner, the Body and the Autopsy; and the final Part V covers Odds and Ends, Mostly Odds (quite a few vampires in this one).

The book and its predecessors are terrific reference books to have on hand if you're planning out and/or in the midst of writing a mystery or thriller. Dr. Lyle also has a Writer's Forensics Blog every writer should have bookmarked. If you have a question of your own you'd like answered (that could even appear in a future book), there's a contact form on Dr. Lyle's website.

Lyle is also the author of stories and novels on his own, including the Dub Walker Thriller series and Royal Pains media tie-in novels. Also due out this year is his book from the American Bar Association titled ABA Fundamentals: Understanding Forensic Science, a book written specifically for attorneys.

Author R&R with Tina Whittle

This week, In Reference to Murder's "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) welcomes Georgia writer Tina Whittle. Tina's book The Dangerous Edge of Things was the first in her series featuring Atlanta gun shop owner Tai Randolph and debuted in February 2011 to starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal. The second installment, Darker Than Any Shadow, was just released by Poisoned Pen Press.

In the sequel, Tai's best friend Rico is competing for a national slam poetry title, and Atlanta is overrun with hundreds of fame-hungry performance poets clogging all the good bars. Everything goes according to plan until one of Rico's fellow poets is murdered and Rico becomes the prime suspect. Tai's love interest, the SWAT-trained corporate security agent Trey Seaver, doesn't want her anywhere near the case, but someone apparently does, sending anonymous clues and clandestine tip-offs her way. But is the mysterious someone wanting to help Tai or lure her into a deadly trap?

The novel also has an unusual element that Tina had to research while writing this book, as she explains:

 

There's an old piece of writing advice that goes something like this — if the tension in your novel starts to sag, bring in a man with a gun. But trust me on this — if you really need to liven things up, bring in a giant snake.

I know this because I took my own advice for my second Tai Randolph novel, Darker Than Any Shadow, which has a ten-foot reticulated python in a key cameo. I auditioned several menacing serpents for this walk-on role, including boa constrictors and Burmese pythons. However, I decided on the retic (as reticulated pythons are sometimes called), the big daddy of the snake world. Here are a few snaky tidbits about this amazing creature:

1. You don't tackle this much snake alone. One rule of thumb for snake handling is one person for every three feet of snake. For an average python — about fifteen feet long — you’ll need four really brave friends. For the largest python on record — 33 feet long and 300+ pounds — you'd need a NASCAR pit crew.

 2. Captive-bred specimens are remarkably even-tempered. Wild caught pythons, however, are extremely nervous and will bite. They may not be venomous, but their teeth point backwards (the better to hold onto you as you squirm, my dear).

 3. As a rule of thumb, these snakes seem able to swallow prey up to ¼ their own length, and up to their own weight.

 4. A python doesn't kill by strangling — it constricts its victim's rib cage slowly and inexorably with every exhale, leaving each subsequent inhale shallower and shallower until there's literally no room to breathe.

 5. Like all snakes, pythons aren't slimy — they're dry and cool and silky. They're also dense with hard-packed spongy muscle, like a scale-covered gummy bear.

 6.  Pythons are ambush predators; they lunge from the shrubbery, sneak up on you in the water and — in the case of the green tree python — tumble from the branches right on top of you.

 7. Pythons normally snack on small mammals, though they occasionally snag deer and gazelle. Swallowing such large prey makes a python slow and clunky and vulnerable to predators. If necessary, however, it can instantly upchuck the whole business right back in its attacker's face and make a speedy getaway. Take that, crocodile!

 8. Pythons use their supersensitive tongues to "taste" where you are . . . and find out which end is your head, for easier swallowing.

 9. They're extremely valuable creatures, selling anywhere from $500 to $5000. A lavender albino ball python was once listed as the most expensive pet in the world— $40,000. Before you decide to adopt one, however, know it's a long-term arrangement; they live 20-30 years in captivity.

 10. Best estimates are that anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 Burmese pythons now call the Florida Everglades home. Right now the only way to deal with the problem is to hunt them down one at a time and drag them out, which the State of Florida hires people to do. New career, anyone?

The world is divided into two camps, it seems — those who fear snakes, and those who find them utterly fascinating. I'm firmly in the latter category. But even if you're in the former, don’t fear. The python in my book is only ten feet long, and you can handle that, right?

 

If you'd like to see how Tina incorporated those tidbits into her story, Darker Than Any Shadow is now available via Poisoned Pen Press and Amazon, and you can also read an excerpt on Tina's website.

Author R&R with Betty Webb

This week's "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) contribution is from Betty Webb, creator of two award-winning series, the Lena Jones books and the Gunn Zoo series. Her latest book, Desert Wind—just released this week—is the seventh mystery starring Arizona private eye Lena Jones and has already earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

In Desert Wind, P.I. Lena Jones's Pima Indian partner Jimmy Sisiwan is arrested in the remote northern Arizona town of Walapai Flats, and Lena closes the Desert Investigations office to rush to his aid. What she finds is a town up in arms over the new uranium mine located only ten miles from the Grand Canyon, as well as two unsolved murders. During Lena's investigation, she encounters not only a community decimated by unsafe mining practices, but a connection to actor John Wayne and the mysterious deaths that occurred during the 1954 filming of The Conqueror. 

Betty passed along the following about how she found herself researching John Wayne for the book:

"Although I had enjoyed The Searchers and True Grit, I’d never been a true John Wayne fan, thus I started my research for DESERT WIND, my seventh Lena Jones mystery, with something less than joy. Still, there was no way around it, because the books plot revolved around the many real-life deaths surrounding the 1954 filming of The Conqueror, in which a heavily-made-up Wayne acted the part of Genghis Khan. The movie has become notorious as John Wayne's worst film – can you imagine Wayne as a Mongol invader, or Susan Hayward as a Mongol princess? – but in order to get my facts straight, I watched it five times.

All the way through. Taking voluminous notes.

Most people know that Wayne died of cancer, as did Susan Hayward. What they don't know is that almost half of The Conqueror's film crew died of cancer, along with approximately 100 Paiute Indians who had been cast as Mongol warriors. And across the counties surrounding the Snow Canyon, Utah, film set, thousands of men, women, and children began dying of cancer at the same rate as the Hollywood film people. Before long, the American Southwest had become a cancer cluster. Uranium mining, much of it on Indian reservations, might have played a part, but one important source I happened across blamed a different culprit.

Now, I'm a journalist, and most of my readers know that all my Lena Jones mysteries are based on real crimes. Like any experienced reporter, I've not only learned the danger of relying on one source alone, but the necessity of visiting the actual scene of whatever crime I'm covering. So for DESERT WIND, I drove 265 miles north from my home in Scottsdale, Arizona, to Snow Canyon, where I spent several days climbing the multi-colored mesas surrounding The Conqueror's old film set, trudging through drifts of orange-red sand. Besides visiting the local libraries and museums, I also interviewed several people who had lived in the area when the dying began. They shared eyewitness accounts of what had transpired all those years ago and how they felt about it today. Some of their comments were surprising.

The lengthiest part of my research took place at home in front of the TV, where as a Netflix subscriber, I entered a marathon of Wayne movie-watching. This would have been enjoyable had I been a bigger Wayne fan, but since I wasn’t, I sulked my way through the first ten or twenty films. But somewhere between McClintock and The Shootist, something startling happened.

I fell in love with John Wayne.

Yes, yes, I know. Wayne was an actor, not a real life cowboy or soldier. But the fact remains that — with the single exception of The Conqueror — he was a smart man who chose his scripts wisely. He was always drawn to scripts where one person made a difference, where bravery and endurance mattered, where standing up for something – an idea, a community, or another human being – was the mark of a true hero. In fact, I discovered that Wayne's films reflected the ideals of my own protagonist, private investigator Lena Jones, who is always rushing to the defense of the defenseless, usually women, children, and the elderly. This is why Publishers Weekly called the Lena books, "mysteries with a social conscience."

Once I realized the commonality between Lena and John Wayne, my feelings about the actor changed, which in turn changed the plot of DESERT WIND. Instead of being a mere first chapter walk-on, Wayne emerged as a central character. The only snag was that the major action in DESERT WIND takes place in present-day Arizona, and Wayne died in 1979. But even that seemingly insurmountable problem was easily remedied when I realized that greatness never really dies. It lives on, sometimes in books, sometimes in films, and maybe – just maybe – sometimes as a walking, talking spirit.

I'm not going to say that DESERT WIND is a ghost story, although in some ways it is. What I will say is that DESERT WIND is a mystery novel about an event that victimized hundreds of thousands.

And one of those victims just might have been John Wayne."


My thanks to Betty for her Author R&R. Betty's books are published by Poisoned Pen Press, and she's also a long-time book reviewer at Mystery Scene Magazine and a member of National Federation of Press Women and Mystery Writers of America. To read an excerpt from Desert Wind, stop by Betty's website.

(Snow Canyon photo above copyright David Lee Pruden.)

Author R&R with William Ryan

I'm starting a new feature on the blog this year, something I call "Author R&R" -- Author Reference and Research. The goal is to to learn how authors go about researching and preparing for their novels, be it through job shadowing, being buried in library stacks, going online, interviews, news reports, whatever techniques and methods they use in getting the details just right. Or whether they feel too much research and over-planning can be deadly to a manuscript.

My first guest is Irish writer William Ryan, whose first novel, The Holy Thief, was shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, CWA John Creasy New Blood Dagger and a Barry Award. That novel and its sequel, the recently-released The Darkening Field (its US title), feature Captain Alexei Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia around the time of Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s.

Here's what Bill had to say about the research that went into those books:

"The Korolev novels are set in 1930s Moscow - at a time when Stalin's purges are in full swing and the Soviet Union is doing its level best to completely control its image, both at home and abroad. Secrecy was an obsession, propaganda was all-pervasive and anyone who was writing, filming or photographing anything whatsoever was careful to make sure they did nothing to disturb the myth that the Soviet Union was a happy and prosperous country, looked over by a paternal Stalin and the envy of the rest of the world. So if nothing was quite as it seemed, how does a writer who didn't experience those years find out what it was really like on a day to day basis?

Well, I started off by reading pretty much anything that was remotely relevant. I've ploughed my way through Stalinist propaganda, taken my hat off to novels written in secret by persecuted authors, been tempted by strange advertisements for Soviet sausage, waded up to my neck in adulatory biographies of Soviet heroes and felt sick at the lies told by foreign travellers to their readers at home. I'm also lucky that there are some brilliant historians writing about the Stalinist period at the moment - Sheila Fitzpatrick, Orlando Figes, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Catherine Merridale and Anne Applebaum, to name but a few - and many of them have accessed material from archives and places I could never hope to come across otherwise. I'm not sure everything I read was directly useful (or enjoyable - I doubt I'll be reading Red Pilot again) but the cumulative result was invaluable when it came to creating the background and atmosphere for the story - and also understanding how propaganda worked in the Soviet Union and what smells right and what smells wrong.

The other tricky job that had to be done was to try and reconstruct what Moscow actually looked like at the time, what the streets were called and what was where. I visit Russia before each book so I can go to the particular places I'm planning to use but, because Moscow has changed so much in the intervening seventy five years, I need to do a lot more than that. It can be even be difficult just to find out what a street was called in 1936 because street maps extending past the centre of Moscow just weren't published up until the eighties because the Soviet Union still feared invasion. It was such an issue for foreigners that in the seventies the CIA made their own map of Moscow for US embassy staff who were tired of getting lost in the Moscow outskirts. In most cities this secrecy about its own geography wouldn't be such a problem for a writer - Fifth Avenue has been Fifth Avenue for well over a hundred years, after all - but in Moscow many streets are now no longer called after the revolutionary heroes they once were. Fortunately one item in my ever-growing research library is a 1937 Moscow guidebook which helps a great deal (it also includes the very odd sausage advertisements) in addition to which www.oldmos.ru has a huge stash of photographs of Moscow from the 1860s onwards catalogued on a modern map. Even so, some locations just weren't photographed - the Lubianka, the headquarters of the Soviet secret police, has changed considerably in appearance over the years but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it took me some time to find a photograph of it that someone was brave enough to take during the 1930s.

Even when I do find a photograph of a location I have to be a bit careful as the same place can look quite different depending on the purpose of the photograph. For example, here are two photographs of Tverskaya, a street that has been altered out of all recognition since 1936 (including its name - back then it was called Gorky). The photographs are taken from locations about a hundred yards apart but of the same section of street. In one everything looks prosperous and bustling - in the other not at all. The first picture was almost certainly taken by a professional photographer and intended to show an idealised view of what a modern city Moscow had become - whereas the second was more likely to have been for personal use and shows a very different version of the same street.

An even better example of how Soviet photographs can twist reality is shown in a photograph of Stalin and his politburo colleagues surveying a recently built canal. The original photograph was taken a few months before the arrest and subsequent execution of the former head of the NKVD, Nikolai Ezhov. In the first photograph Ezhov is the small man on Stalin's right looking understandably nervous and in the second he's completely disappeared. Or has he? If you look carefully you can see his ghostly shape on the water - a fitting end for a man who caused millions to disappear in the purges he orchestrated for Stalin.

The dilemma for every novelist is how much research to put onto the page and I think the less the better. After all, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories over a hundred years ago and they're as readable today as they ever were. Conan Doyle didn't explain every little detail of Victorian life because he didn't have to and, as modern readers, we're still able to work out what's going on and why. Sometimes details do have to be fleshed out a bit but I try to do it as briefly as possible. It might sound like research is a waste of time if I don't use it that much in the books but it doesn't work that way, or at least I don't think it does. All the background information a writer has helps them to tell the story with confidence and to avoid those little mistakes that readers pick up on and which spoil the flow of the novel for them. It's that easy flow and confidence that I want from a writer when I'm reading their book - someone who knows where we're going and why we're going there."

You can download the first two chapters of The Darkening field via this link.

My thanks to Bill for giving us some background on his research process and novels! Next week:  Betty Webb, author of a series with western P.I. Lena Jones and Pima Indian partner Jimmy Sisiwan.

 

Twelve Days of Bookmas: Zoë Sharp

Zoë Sharp was born in Nottinghamshire, but spent most of her childhood living on a catamaran on the northwest coast of England. Zoë wrote her first novel when she was fifteen, but success came in 2001 with the publication of the first Charlie Fox book, Killer Instinct. Nine successful installments in the series later, she's been nominated for Barry Awards (and also the Edgars, Anthonys, and Daggers for her writing) and in 2010 the Charlie Fox series was optioned by Twentieth Century Fox TV.

Charlie Fox has been described as a female version of Lee Child's Jack Reacher, a former special forces trainee turned bodyguard. The latest Charlie Fox novel, Fifth Victim, will be released in the U.S. in 2012, and finds the life of Charlie's lover, Sean, hanging in the balance, while Charlie takes on a case protecting the wayward daughter of a rich businesswoman. When the man who put Sean in his coma is turned loose, Charlies is faced with the choice between her loyalties to her client and avenging Sean.

Zoë's Bookmas offering is one shared by a lot of folks around this sometimes overly-stressful season, especially as we miss loved ones who are no longer with us, and brings to mind the lyrics of "Auld Lang Syne":

Christmas is short days and long nights, Turkish Delight, wind, rain, sleet, and snow, long games of Scrabble, mince pies, snow sculpting, hunting through a box of liquorish Allsorts until only the coconut ones are left, walks in the cold, Die Hard, frost on cobwebs, icy steps, digging the car out, slow-cooked roast and cold cuts, old movies and new books.

A time of melancholy, reflection, regret.

A time to remember where we were last year, and where we thought we’d be this.

A time to remember those who were here last year, and won’t be here this, or next.

A time to think of the Macmillan Cancer nurses, who looked after my Aunt Mary right to the end. Mary, who always wanted to write but never had the courage to show her words to anyone.

For me, Christmas is a time to think of what might have been.

Zoë's charity, Macmillan Cancer Support, provides practical, medical and financial support for cancer patients like Zoë's Aunt Mary and also pushes for better cancer care. They accept donations from UK residents via this link, and if you're outside the UK, the charity has other ways you can help.

Twelve Days of Bookmas: Timothy Hallinan

Timothy Hallinan was a singer/songwriter in a rock band while in college, with many of his songs recorded by well-known artists including the platinum-selling group Bread. He began writing books while enjoying a successful career in the television industry and is the author of several widely praised books in three different series. Along with his wife, Munyin Choy, he divides his time equally between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia. Recently, he contributed to two short-story collections that raised money for Japanese disaster relief and Bangkok street children.

His most recent series of novels are set in Bangkok and feature Poke Rafferty, an American expatriate writer living in Thailand with his lover Rose, the former "queen" of the Patpong bars, and an adopted daughter, Miaow. The latest installment, The Queen of Patpong—involving a nightmare figure from Rose's past who threatens the Rafferty clan's peace, love, home and even their lives—was nominated for both the Edgar and the Macavity awards.

Tim's holiday offering for Bookmas is a touching tale of love and devotion tinged with humor, and he also selects a deserving charity:

My father was a poor Irish kid from Chicago and my mother was a rich society girl from Los Angeles. When my father proposed, my mother's parents were horrified, so the two of them eloped to Santa Barbara, where my father presented her with a ring that had a diamond so small it was practically invisible. It would have been an exaggeration to call it a chip.

But he did very well financially over the years, and when I was thirteen, he gave my mother a Christmas present in a very small box which, when opened, contained a perfect two-carat diamond. My mother almost fainted, but when I looked at my father, what I saw in his face was a fifteen-year-old boy who's just fallen in love for the first time.

Decades passed. My father died, and my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She began to give things away.  I was living at the time with my longtime girlfriend, Munyin Choy, and for some reason she had not gone down to San Diego with me to see my Mom. On the last evening of my stay, which was only a few days before Christmas, Mom took off the ring and said, "I want you to have this."

I said, "What in the world will I do with it?"

She said, "If you have the sense God gave a goose, you'll get down on one knee and offer it to Munyin."

I did, and she accepted it (and me), and we were married a few months before my mother passed away.  It was incomparably the greatest Christmas present of my life.

I'd like to suggest that anyone wanting to do good for some of the world's most deserving kids go to the Mercy Center's website and click the "Donate" button. Father Joe Maier feeds, houses, and educates Bangkok's street children, and some of their schools were destroyed in the recent floods. Father Joe puts to good use every single penny he receives.

All the best, and happy holidays.

Tim Hallinan

12 Days of Bookmas: Paul Doiron

Paul Doiron is the editor in chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, Down East Books, and DownEast.com. A native of Maine, he attended Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in English, and he holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. He's also a Registered Maine Guide specializing in fly fishing and outdoor recreation and lives on a trout stream in the coastal part of the state.

Paul is author of the Mike Bowditch series of crime novels, including The Poacher's Son, which won the the Barry Award and the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel and has been nominated for an Edgar Award, an Anthony Award, A Macavity Award, and a Thriller Award for Best First Novel. His second book in the Mike Bowditch series, Trespasser, was an American Booksellers Association Indie Bestseller and has been called a "masterpiece of high-octane narrative" by Booklist. The third Mike Bowditch installment, Bad Little Falls, will be published in August 2012 by Minotaur.

For his holiday offering, Paul passed along a great, and unusual read:

My Christmas recommendation is on the dark side, which I suppose is fitting given my occupation. It's "The Ledge": a horrifying short story written in 1959 by Lawrence Sargent Hall, based on actual events. A Maine fisherman takes his son and another boy duck hunting at sea on a bitter Christmas morning. They pull their skiff onto an offshore ledge that is normally underwater at high tide. After they have finished shooting for the morning, they discover that their skiff has floated away...and the tide is rising. I won't reveal what happens, but there's a reason John Updike included "The Ledge" in the collection he edited, The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," it's one of those stories you read once and never forget. (Here's a link to Hall reading the story.)

In the spirit of the story, I'd ask that readers consider supporting the important conservation work of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust.

Best wishes,

Paul