In Reference to Murder

More Sad News

On the heels of Ed Hoch's death this past week comes news that award-winning author Benjamin Schutz has died suddenly from a heart attack.  Schutz was the author of the acclaimed psychological thriller, The Mongol Reply and a forensic psychologist who lived in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., making him a neighbor of sorts.

In light of yesterday's blog entry about awards, it's only fitting to make note of the fact that Schutz was nominated for four Shamus Awards--Best First P.I. Novel Embrace the Wolf (1986), Best P.I. Hardcover A Tax in Blood (1988) and A Fistful of Empty (1992), winning in 1988, and also his short story "Mary, Mary Shut the Door" debuting his protagonist Leo Haggerty (1993). He won an Edgar Award for the short story that same year, which he included in an anthology of his stories in 2005.

The Thrilling Detective site has an archived interview from Rara Avis with Schutz , in which he talks about  his Leo Haggerty series. In it he said:

"After writing the Haggerty books, I switched to writing short stories. I have no plans to return to Leo Haggerty. Short stories have provided me with a way to explore narrative options and genre types that I hadn't tried before. Both of my sons worked as private eyes for a couple of years during college. I saw ways to explore old issues from a new perspective and entirely new issues as I watched two middle class suburban youths encounter the meaner streets. I started with a short story based on their experiences and hope to do a novel using Sean and Matt Ellis.
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Being a psychologist and writing detective fiction are two sides of the same coin. Only the mysteries change. In the therapy hour, it's 'Why do I do these self-destructive things?' In the forensic arena it's 'Do we accept the pedophile's claim that there are no other victims?' Being a therapist teaches a great respect for the power of language. The right words at the right time can heal people. It's not a big jump to the power of the written word and it's ability to enthrall.
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As a forensic investigator you learn that the devil and everyone else is in the details. Building a case is often described as the process of piling up a big wall of small facts and then pushing them over on someone. That approach helps immeasurably with plotting. Being a therapist and a forensic investigator gives you first-hand experience with the lies and evasions people use to avoid confronting the truth about themselves. That's enormously useful in understanding how to peel back the layers of motivation as you develop character. Finally, being a therapist reminds you that living people always escape the trap of our theories, are always surprising us and that our fictional characters should do the same if they are truly alive."

   

The Envelope, Please...

If December is the month for "Best Of The Year" lists, then January is the month for awards nominations. We've already had the Dilys (from the IMBA), the Edgars (MWA), the Leftys (Left Coast Conference), and the British Crime Writers' Association just announced it had awarded its twenty-third Cartier Diamond Dagger (for sustained excellence in the genre of crime writing) to Sue Grafton. There will be others sprinkled throughout the year, of course, the Anthonys (Bouchercon), Macavitys, Shamus, and Barry awards, among others.

But what is such an award (or nomination) worth? Does it mean anything to the writer and average reader?

If you look at all book/literary prizes, you can definitely say that an award means a spike, even if temporary, in sales. A Quill and Quire article from last year indicated the shortlist announcement for the Scotiabank Giller Prize sparked a sales surge that averaged a 388% increase in weekly sales for the listed titles. If you really want to get a good look (literally -- with charts!) of the sales boost an award can provide, check out the Nielsen Bookscan powerpoint document on what the 2003 Booker Prize did for its nominees. However, Bob Minzesheimer of USA Today, has said that the "impact of the prize depends on the author and book. Biggest benefit, I think, is to someone not very well known yet."

There may be other less tangible rewards to winning or being nominated, however. Jacqueline Church Simonds, in the Independent Publisher Online Magazine, pointed out that one overlooked benefit to winning an award or nomination is its importance in selling foreign (or any other subsidiary) rights. The publisher of ForeWord Magazine, Victoria Sutherland, has a rather impressive list of what an award can do for an author, including aid in the critic’s/reviewer's selection process, encouraging face-out display at bookstores, providing renewed life to an "old" title for continued publicity efforts, stimulating author/publisher interviews, and serving as incentives for future publishing deals.

Okay, so awards can be good for sales. Are they good overall for the writer and the reader? JA Konrath, in his blog entry "Are Awards Their Own Reward?" says "A small percentage of popular authors keep being nominated for awards, and many of them keep winning. These authors are usually bestsellers. But the larger percentage of winners and nominees don't ever achieve bestsellerdom. And many bestsellers never get nominated for awards, which really makes me wonder." He goes on to say "The system breeds more stress and disappointment and frustration than it does happiness."

Barbara Peterson's most recent Poisoned Pen newsletter echoed those sentiments, "I find it interesting that not one of these books [the 2008 Edgar nomineses] made it into either the long list or the final list of nominees for the Dilys Award. The Dilys is made on the basis of what bookstores most enjoyed selling, and much of our discussion about that had to do with how customers reacted to the titles, enjoyed reading them, and almost inevitably, to strong sales."

Still, if you're an average mystery reader out there who's overwhelmed by the thousands of titles you'll find on various bookstore shelves, that little "award winner" label on a cover can be just what it takes for you to pick it up.

Rick Kleffel and Terry D'Auray in their "Agony Column" once wrote a humorous piece about the award-winning agonies and how awards play a pretty big part in book-buying habits, if not always a positive one. They said,

The most important lesson to learn about awards is this - consider the source. Booksellers, writers, publishers, and fans all have different takes on quality, different tastes, and vastly different criteria. I'm always amused by the "Daggers" - Golden for first place, Silver for second - awarded to the best crime novel of the year in the UK as nominated by publishers. Its full title is the Macallan Gold Dagger/Silver Dagger, because it is sponsored by Macallan, distiller of single Highland malt whiskey. It opens a whole new commercial opportunity in this era of "sponsored" (bought and paid for) sports events and stadiums. The Minute Maid Mystery, the Wrigley Gumshoe, the Heineken Historical, the PacBell Procedural (AKA, the phone book) or the Comcast Cozy."

And speaking of humor, it helps to get a little perspective by reading articles like the one in a 2007 online Library Journal Bookblog talking about the Edgar, and how, as a ceramic bust of Edgar Allen Poe, it's probably the ugliest award on the planet. Jonathon King said that when he won his Edgar Award in 2003 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, his then-ten-year-old daughter offered to repaint the statuette to make it prettier. One presenter advised winners to enjoy their ugly awards, and then when the winner of the Best First Novel was about to be announced, one of the statuettes broke in half. The article writer wonders, "Was it due to the malevolent presence of Grand Master Stephen King, as one waggish presenter suggested, or did the Edgar, as another presenter noted, finally realize how ugly he was and broke in two?"

That's What We've Been Saying

It appears that Reuters has just learned that crime fiction writers turn to the Internet for inspiration and research.  News flash!  In an article dated yesterday and titled "Web Yields Deadly Tricks for Crime Writers," the journalist writes how authors are digging up fodder for their next book by logging on. 

In a sense, that's what inspired this Blog to begin with.

The article references best-selling author Lee Child who said he found inspiration for his next book, due in 2009, while dabbling on the Internet.

"I was just surfing the Web and came across some law enforcement sites where there was a list of visual indicators for recognizing a suicide bomber," said Child.

"I started this new book with the idea that my hero is on the subway in New York late at night and gazing at this person and realizes that this hits 11 out of 11 on this list and what is he going to do about it," he said. "It started just purely from some idle browsing on the Web."

Child went on to say that one of the great benefits of tapping into the right police blog site is that writers can learn about tension between departments, staff and bosses, personal concerns and how they balance the "banal with the extraordinary."

"It's like coming up out of a tunnel into a different world. If you are reasonably sensitive to words and nuance, like all writers ought to be, you can actually pick up a tremendous amount of good stuff almost accidentally."

Speaking of police and law enforcement blogs, I have a few listed in The List (under the Blogs section) and lots of reality-based news and links under the True Crime section. So if you have aspirations of being a Lee Child (or much more humbly, a BV Lawson), start trawling the links and nuance yourself into better stories and novels.

A Little Breather

I finally got caught up on a lot of backlogged links I wanted to add to The List section of this blog. They'd been staring at me accusingly every time I opened my bookmarks file, wondering why I hadn't taken care of them yet. So, I plugged them in to the pertinent sections where they belonged, and now they seem quite happy. This takes The List to somewhere around 2,400 links, which is a nice number, I think, although my original intention was to have these lovely long annotated entries for each. Umm hmm. If I didn't have a day job and a writing sideline to boot, perhaps.

I can't say I have a favorite section, although I really enjoyed compiling the Forensics page, learning a little bit about such arcane subjects as serology, ear marks, entomology, tire treads, and palynology (pollen) among others.  I wish I could say this makes me an expert on everything forensic or even everything mystery-related, but I feel more like a librarian; not so much an expert as a conduit for experts. Having a memory roughly equivalent to Swiss cheese probably doesn't help much, either.

If you haven't wandered around the aisles of The List lately, take a moment to look around and do some sleuthing. You never know what you might find.

IMBA Bestsellers

  The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA) announced their December bestsellers which included the holiday season. Here's their list:

Hardcovers:

1)  'T' IS FOR TRESPASS by Sue Grafton

2)  PERSON OF INTEREST by Theresa Schwegel

3)  HER ROYAL SPYNESS by Rhys Bowen

4)  LORD JOHN AND THE HAND OF DEVILS by Diana Gabaldon

5)  THE VENETIAN BETRAYAL by Steve Berry

6)  THE DARKEST EVENING by Dean Koontz

              tied with

       KISSING CHRISTMAS GOODBYE by M.C. Beaton  

8)  SPQR XI: UNDER VESUVIUS by John Maddox Roberts

               tied with  

      KNITTING BONES by Monica Ferris

10) RED MANDARIN DRESS By Qiu Xiaolong

 

 

Paperbacks:

 

1)  DUST by Martha Grimes

2)  TRAP DOOR by Sarah Graves

3)  THE MYSTERY LOVER'S PUZZLE BOOK by Linda Murdock

4)  THE TOMB OF ZEUS by Barbara Cleverly

5)  REAL MURDERS by Charlaine Harris

              tied with

     THE BLADE ITSELF by Marcus Sakey

7)  PREACHING TO THE CORPSE by Roberta Islieb

8)  MURDER 101 by Maggie Barbieri

9)  FIRE TRAP  

      * no number 10 -- not enough consensus for a listing

There weren't a lot of surprises for me on the above, with the possible exception of "The Mystery Lover's Puzzle Book."  According to the publisher's blurb, "Have fun with crossword puzzles about your favorite mystery sleuths from the humorous Evanovich to the fast-paced Sandford. If you are not acquainted with the authors, then let this be an introduction to a series of new books. Information on each series includes type of mystery, its time period, its setting, the main characters and their occupations. A short review helps you decide whether or not you would enjoy them. The handy check-off list of titles in order makes it easy for you to keep track of the next book in the series. Read the review, which contains some of the answers to the puzzle, after doing the crosswords."

So, you can waste a little time while learning a thing or two about mystery novels. Throw in an iced Americano (with or without half and half), and you've got yourself a deal.

 

A Shout Out to SinC

Hopefully, you've all heard about SinC (Sisters in Crime) by now, the organization with 3400 members in 48 chapters world-wide, which offers networking, advice and support to mystery authors. It's not just for women, either, and the Internet Chapter current has a man, Steve Kelner, serving as President.

One new feature the organization is providing in 2008 is Mentor Mondays on the group's listserv, which will bring experts in the field to the forum for questions. Margaret Maron, multiple award-winning SinC author, started the program off last week by sharing her writing process, the business, and writing in general. On January 14 the guest will be Paige Wheeler, a literary agent from Folio Literary Management. If you’d like to join the listserv to participate in the active discussions there, the information is on the homepage of the web site.

Other upcoming mentors will include:

Jan. 21 -- Nancy Pickard (author of the award-winning THE VIRGIN OF SMALL PLAINS
Jan. 28 -- Gary Niebuhr, librarian and author
Feb. 4 -- Margaret Coel (the Father John and Vicky Holden Series)
Feb. 12 (Tuesday) -- Janet Reid, agent
Feb. 18 -- Madeira James, web designer
Feb. 25 -- Eve Sandstrom (the Nell Matthews Mysteries and "Down Home" series)
March 3 -- Susan Wittig Albert (China  Bayles and Kathryn Ardleigh series)
March 10 -- Doris Ann Norris and Mary Boone, librarians
March 17 -- Julie Smith (Talba Wallis Louisiana noir series)
April 7 -- Chris Roerden, author of DON'T MURDER YOUR MYSTERY

(Calendar thanks to the ever-helpful and hard-working Sandra Parshall, who must surely have cloned herself by now to do everything she does.)

If you aren't already a member, you should think about joining. It doesn't cost much and the rewards of support and encouragement are priceless (you don't even have to charge dues on your Mastercard).  In addition to local chapters, there is an Internet Chapter as mentioned above, and the Web-based Guppies group which was started to assist unpublished authors with critiques and publishing advice.

Seattle Mystery

JB Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, learned a lesson about the "viral" Internet, at least on a small scale (including this blog, as of this posting), when he wrote a letter to the author of a piece in the Seattle Times and got a call from the book editor wanting to print the letter in an upcoming arts section of the paper. JB was uncomfortable with that, but it wound up on the newspaper's web site, anyway, and then got picked up both Publisher's Lunch and Shelf Awareness and distributed to thousands of people.

Although he was a bit nonplussed by the whole deal, the subject of his original letter was quite valid, namely that "Local media seems to only pay attention to an independent bookshop when it closes. Not all do. But by continuing to do stories only about the sad death of an independent and not the throbbing life of the others, the media is perhaps contributing to the problems we all face." And he should know; 2007 was the Seattle Mystery Bookshop's "best year ever" (sales rose 6.5%).

Way to go, JB. Live long and prosper.

The Lefty

The Left Coast Crime 2008 "Lefty" award nominations were announced the other day.  For those who don't know, the Left Coast Crime Conference is held annually at rotating locations in the western U.S. (with one exception, the UK in 2006).  This year's conference will take place March 6-9 in Denver, Colorado.  Each year, the conference awards "The Lefty" for the most humorous mystery printed in the previous calendar year.

The nominees for 2007's Most Humorous Mystery are:

Donna Andrews, THE PENGUIN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
Don Bruns, STUFF TO DIE FOR
Jeff Cohen, SOME LIKE IT HOT BUTTERED
Jess Lourey, KNEE HIGH BY THE FOURTH OF JULY
Elaine Viets, MURDER WITH RESERVATIONS

And the nominees for the "Rocky" (2007 Best Mystery set in the LCC Geographical Area) are:

C.J. Box, FREE FIRE
Bill Cameron, LOST DOG
Margaret Coel, THE GIRL WITH THE BRAIDED HAIR
Tim Maleeny, STEALING THE DRAGON
Twist Phelan, FALSE FORTUNE

Nominess for the Arty (2007 Best Cover on a Mystery):

Megan Abbott, QUEENPIN
Laura Benedict, ISABELLA MOON
Rhys Bowen, HER ROYAL SPYNESS
Ken Isaacson, SILENT COUNSEL
Tim Maleeny, STEALING THE DRAGON    

 

Last year's Lefty winner was Donna Moore for GO TO HELENA HANDBASKET (Point Blank Press).

Blue Skies Smiling at Me

Over the holidays, the hubster and I climbed into a little Cessna 172 putt-putt and flew approximately 1700 nautical miles to see both sets of 'rents who happen to live 900 miles apart. That's about 20 hours in the cramped cockpit. Not all that different from sitting down at a computer for 8 hours at a time, when you think about it. Plus, you get to avoid being strip-searched, having to remove your shoes, and standing in long lines at airports OR swerving to avoid large trucks and bad drivers on the Interstates.

It's an amazing way to travel.

There are a lot of interesting sights up there you can't get on the ground or even in commercial jets, since they fly at high altitudes. At around 7-9,000 feet, you can watch the sunset and see lights wink on in cities below, like groups of synchronous fireflies. You can see a rainbow wrapping around you in a 360-degree prismatic circle while watching trawlers off the coastline over the aquamarine waters which are sometimes clear enough to catch a glimpse of a submarine near the Florida/Georgia border. The eeriest sensation is flying at night in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), in a cocoon of clouds that feels like you're enveloped in your own little universe, with only the occasional disembodied ATC voice over the radio to remind you that you're somewhere over the U.S. (well, that and the GPS, if you have one). It's almost like something out of the Twilight Zone.

It set me to thinking about mystery novels featuring pilots, and while there are a good number of stand-alone thrillers (this page lists a few), there aren't many series featuring pilots or aviation. Marcia Muller is probably the best known, with her protagonist and San Francisco-based private detective Sharon McCone, a general aviation pilot who marries another pilot with a shadowy past in an unnamed intelligence agency. In Both Ends of the Night, McCone helps her friend and former flight instructor, Matty, investigate the disappearance of her boyfriend. When Matty dies in a suspicious plane crash, McCone is convinced the boyfriend's disappearance is connected to her friend's death and will stop at nothing to solve the case. An excerpt from the first page reads, "Landing at Los Alegres Municipal Airport felt like coming home. I angled in on the forty-five toward mid-field, turned downwind, and pressed the button on my headset. 'Los Alegres traffic, Cessna four-four-two-five Whiskey, downwind for landing, two-niner.' The 150 I'd rented at Oakland was identical to the plane I'd trained in. Los Alegres was where I'd learned the ABC's of flying."

Muller once said in a New York Times interview that "Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons. Most of my friends called that a devotion to my work bordering on insanity. While roaring down a rapidly shrinking runway at 90 miles per hour in a contraption that resembled nothing so much as a matchbox with wings eventually became commonplace, my airborne experiences were such that I determined never to allow McCone to take up skydiving."

John J. Nance, an ABC aviation analyst, has written several aviation-related thrillers (Fire Flight, Blackout, Turbulence). Some feature pilots, some don't, but most use what Publishers Weekly called his "his successful formula of race-against-the-clock plotting and in-flight suspense."

Author Tom Casey, an American Airlines pilot, has written a couple of stand-alone suspense novels featuring different pilot protagonists. Human Error has pilot Hugo Price questioning whether his personal problems contributed to a fatal plane crash. In Strangers' Gate, pilot Jason Walker cashes out of his job as a dot-com executive shortly before his marriage goes up in flames, and finds himself in the middle of a drug money scheme. Norman Mailer said of the latter book, "I know of no other American novel where the protagonist is an accomplished pilot who can also write the story with his own fair share of winged prose."

Although not pilot-related, Lynne Heitman has a series of four books to date featuring former airline operations manager turned private investigator Alex Shanahan. Heitman herself was the  former American Airlines general manager at Logan Airport.

Not a long list, to be sure, but there are probably others. With gazillions of mystery series featuring all sorts of unusual protagonist occupations, I have to wonder why there aren't more pilots in the mix, especially with over 600,000 active certificated pilots in the U.S. alone. Perhaps my mother and brother--both entrenched aerophobes--may hold a clue.

Coming Soon?

Here are a couple of TV notes to pass along. Due to the writers' strike, the major networks are talking about "repurposing" programs from their cable outlets to show during prime time. The Hollywood Reporter notes that CBS is definitely going to start airing "Dexter," now seen on Showtime, starting in February.  Dexter is based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay and adapted for television by Emmy Award-winning screenwriter James Manos. The show stars Michael C. Hall (of "Six Feet Under" fame) as a Miami-based serial killer who works for the Miami Metro Police Department as a blood pattern analyst.

Also rumored:  Monk may move to NBC, and that network may also "re-repurpose" "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," which had moved over to USA. Warner Bros. TV took its crime procedural "The Closer" to the broadcast networks a few months ago, but no deal has been struck with any one network.

And finally, last night, PBS broadcast a one-hour documentary as part of the four-part miniseries "Pioneers of Television," with this episode focusing on late-night giants Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson. (Other installments coming up in January cover variety shows and game shows).  Producers Steve Boettcher and Mike Trinklein are working on a new 4-part "Pioneers" series which will include crime dramas. No word yet on content or a potential air date.