Murder Mysteries -- An Essay

image from 8Tracks

Or why I quit reading one book without finishing it and go on to one of my goto writers even if I've read their book before. I know, I know -- where's the mystery in a mystery book you've read before. Or if you're binge watching TV and it's the fourth time you've seen that episode of Blue Bloods? You know whodunit already.

And we're talking mysteries here. Not thrillers. The difference? Well, in a thriller you know whodunit. Or, maybe not. But you're inside the whodunit's head and you know what he's going to do, but the hero doesn't. Or that poor dumb ingenue at the head of the steep, dark stairs into the dreaded basement. Why do they always go down there?

Okay, so I don't like thrillers. They're like horror movies. They're either really dumb or really scary. Either way, I'm not interested. And I sure as hell wouldn't go down those stairs.

What brought this on? As you might know, I am recovering from total knee replacement surgery, which here means that between pain meds and restricted activity, I just haven't been writing. I have, though, learned many important lessons: You can sleep on your back. But not in your bed. That's what lounge chairs were invented for. Rehab exercises can be painful. That's what pain meds were invented for. And when you take pain meds you can sleep on your back in lounge chairs. But you cannot string thoughts together in any kind of coherent fashion. You can read and you can watch TV. Especially if you've already read that book or seen that episode. But you cannot write.

Maybe I'm far enough along in my rehab that I can write. Nothing deep and maybe not particularly thought provoking unless thoughts come to you largely unprovoked. But here goes.

I finished the 14th and last book in Robert Jordan's fantasy series Wheel of Time a couple of weeks after the surgery. I'd read them before, but as always there were things I'd missed or forgotten. And it didn't matter much if I drifted off to sleep, I knew where I was when I woke again.

Then I went to John Lescroart's Dismas Hardy murder mysteries. I'd only read them once before. I was still enough in a fog that my previous reading didn't get in the way of my enjoyment -- once I got past that editor-in-my-brain who kept saying "I'd write it this way!" Obviously my health was improving.

I ran through the first four books in a little more than a week. It's just fascinating how many ways murder can be done and for how many reasons.

Anyway, I didn't have the fifth Dismas Hardy book on my Nook and I can't navigate the stairs (even with the lights on) into the basement where our library lives so I don't know if I have that book in hard copy or not.

I could have asked my husband to look for it. But I'd already asked him to find our Bend It Like Beckham DVD and he never did. Maybe he forgot. But, hey! He's been doing the laundry, cooking, dishes, grocery shopping, driving me to doctor's appointments and physical therapy, and cheering me on. So, what I'm doing here is what my Grandmother used to do. She never complained. But she did point out exactly what it was she never complained about.

I do appreciate him and all the help he's being. And he knows we'll be doing this all again in a couple of months. He's a rock! And it doesn't hurt that he's pretty cute, too.

Anyway, under all the detritus on my side of the bed (that I am only just now being able to sleep in again) was a Ken Follett book, A Place Called Freedom, that I'd never read. I don't even remember buying it, but it has a pink sticker on it marked $1.99. So I'd say I got it at ARC, my favorite thrift store. And now you know why I usually steer clear of their book section. If I go there, I'm gonna buy one. Or, at these prices, a dozen. And the money goes to good purpose.

I like Ken Follet's work, but ....

Having grown up in Oklahoma, I'm quite familiar with my country's despicable history with slavery, segregation, and discrimination. And the continuing ramifications. Interestingly enough, I'm always a bit surprised to discover that slavery was not peculiar to the American South, indeed, not peculiar to America at all.

A Place Called Freedom takes place just before the American Revolution. It follows a young man from his life as a miner in Scotland -- where miner's children were 'dedicated' during their baptismal rites "to work in [the laird's] mines, boy and man, for as long as he is able, or until he die.'' Not strictly legal, but the miners didn't know that. They were required to go down in the mines as children and if they worked in the mine one year and one day following their 21st birthday, they were the mine owner's property for the rest of their lives. And that part was strictly legal.

Malachi McAsh escapes the mine, Scotland, and eventually England, too. But so many bad things happen to him with no let up that I just could not continue reading the book.

You know, I almost quit reading in the middle of one of the books in the Harry Potter series. I don't remember which one it was but it was the one with Dolores Umbridge as the onsite bad guy. Probably the only reason I kept reading Harry Potter was that I was so invested in Harry that I couldn't quit and after I'd read that particular volume, I knew I didn't ever have to read that one again.

Chances are good that I'll never know how Mr. McAsh's life turned out.

Murder mysteries? Why on Earth would I leave a book following a character who is constantly besieged by perfectly dreadful events and turn to a murder mystery? Speaking of 'perfectly dreadful events.'

Because! Especially because it's John Lescroart's murder mystery. His characters are all three-dimensional. Four dimensional, actually, because the books not only show their whole selves, but their selves as they live through time. They experience: dark thoughts in dark events overseen by dangerous people in their work as policemen and attorneys; humorous interactions with people they love; joyous events in their lives quite separate from their work; and, sometimes, even sad events in their lives separate from their work.

And in John Lescroart's murder mysteries we're given things to think about. Like this from Nothing but the Truth. Dismas Hardy's cop friend Abe is half Jewish, half Black and all homicide inspector for the San Francisco Police Department.

Abe's father is thinking:
     "Lots of times when he'd been younger, he'd been less than diligent at keeping the Sabbath,
     but now in his eighth decade he'd come to believe that the Ten Commandments had gotten
     everything exactly right if you wanted to have a world full of healthy and productive
     people. People should pay attention to the wisdom in all ten of them, he believed. They
     really should. Keeping the Sabbath, taking a day off, kept you sane."

Now this passage may not help you or the book's heroes solve the mystery, but it goes a long way to tell us who our main characters are and how they got that way -- all the while dispensing some very useful wisdom.

Plus! At the end of most murder mysteries, we as readers have the satisfaction of not only finding out whodunit and why, but the baddies get their just deserts. (With a nod to Lemony Snicket) which here means "what they deserve."

"...the word 'desert' — [when pronounced with the accent on the second syllable like the word dessert] — ...refers to a deserved reward or punishment. Therefore, someone who does wrong and is punished in a suitable manner has received his 'just deserts.'" http://www.snopes.com/language/notthink/deserts.asp

The Sympathizer -- a review

image from atlantaima.org

The Jaipur Literature Festival is coming to Boulder in September. I will be there -- you betcha!

I decided to read some of the presenters who will be at the JLF in Boulder. Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Best Fiction will be one of the presenters. During Terry Gross' interview with him on NPR, he was thoughtful, articulate, and thought provoking. He discussed his experiences in the Vietnamese community in California.

He told of his parents warning him and his brother not to open their door to unknown Vietnamese because they were afraid of home invasions by Vietnamese gangs. Ms. Gross asked why people who had fled war torn Vietnam would engage in violence here against their fellow countrymen. His eye-opening explanation was that they did come from that same war torn Vietnam. A country that taught them to stash their money and valuables in their homes. A country that taught them not to trust the police who, in Vietnam, were too often as likely to harm them as the 'criminals.' A country caught in a generation-long civil war that taught Vietnamese to attack Vietnamese.

That concept can be applied to why anyone victimizes someone like themselves. Not  because they necessarily share a background of civil war, but because they do share a common background and know their victim's habits and fears. That familiarity gives the criminal an advantage they would not have with someone whose circumstances they knew less well.

Past debut novels that won Pulitzers include Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird, two of my all-time favorites.

I was ready for a good read.

It's in first person. I don't particularly like first person. But Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is in first person. (Read my April 13, 2015 review)  Not just first person, but first person from five points of view. An unusual structure for a novel. An amazingly difficult bit of literary art to successfully pull off. Which the author did. Admirably. It is a great read.

So I willing overlooked The Sympathizer's first person narrative. It could be good.

Nguyen doesn't use standard punctuation. Anathema to an old English Major. But Cormac McCarthy doesn't use standard punctuation. When I started his Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. See my December 3, 2014 review.) I was particularly distressed about McCarthy's failure to use quote marks and attributions in the dialogue. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to follow who was saying what. But he wrote his characters' speech patterns so skillfully that I had no problem.

Failure to use standard punctuation need not be a deal breaker.

Stories whose plots unfold slowly featuring main characters who lack charisma don't necessarily put me off. (See my recent review of the movie The Lady in the Van.)

So I believed that if I read assiduously for as long as it might take, the book would get better.

After reading off and on for a week I'd only gotten to page 180 -- more off than on. But I felt I should give it a chance. I take the stand that stopping a book you've started is immoral. It is judgmental, ungracious, and downright disdainful of a fellow writer who has worked long and hard and done the best they could.

Then a writer friend Sabrina Fish shared a question from The Writer's Circle -- "You wake up stranded on an island with the main character of the last book you read. How does that work out for you?"

And you know what? I stopped reading The Sympathizer. I could not face the prospect of being stranded in a plodding plot with Nguyen's main character in first person. Never knowing if it was dialogue or the main character's thoughts or the author's thoughts.

Quick! Quick! Choose another JLF presenter. Done.

I chose William Dalrymple's White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-century India. Mr. Dalrymple is a Scottish historian. Even his footnotes are interesting.

Using Real World Senses

Green Mountain December 18, 2015

A writer needs to involve all the senses to set a scene or build a character. A good way to prepare to do this is to just pay attention to your own senses in the real world.

I walk in my neighborhood and gather ample sensory fodder to use.

First the sense of sight. In the distance, Green Mountain is obviously white, but the blue sky over Green Mountain tells me this snow is past. And the view is clear -- no blowing snow to dim the view, no shadows identifying the nooks and crannies of the mountain so the sun must still be in the east or overhead.

And touch. If you could've seen me, you'd know that I was wearing a t-shirt. No coat. No gloves. No hat. When I touched the snow, it was cold enough to make my hands ache. And wet enough to hold the snow ball shape. Yet all the while, the Colorado sun is warm against my skin, regardless of the ambient temperature. Warm enough to be perfectly comfortable. And there is no wind, not even a light breeze, and the lack of moving air touching my face is as palpable as a 20 mph gust, if I'm paying attention.

I'm surrounded by sound. Children squeal with delight and call back and forth to each other as they sled down a nearby hill. A tree full of magpies sound off. Their raucous cries punctuated with the piping of chickadees and counted by the coo of a dove. Somewhere a dog barks. And I can barely hear the traffic noises from the distant interstate highway. Barely, but it's there. The melting snow sounds of running water, while it crunches under foot in areas where it refroze in the night.

But scent, that's the one that I think is most important and least described in most written material. It may not be obvious enough to grab our attention, but it's there. Sometimes soft, calming, like a newly bathed and powdered baby. Sometimes energizing like the air in my neighborhood. Clear and cold and smelling of winter.

Then as I walk, I smell someone's dryer exhaust redolent with the scent of their fabric softener sheet.
And it occurs to me that the smell of clean is different from one person to the next. That can tell a lot about a character. To one character, that dryer sheet smells clean. To another the smell of sun-dried laundry means clean.

And scent from a house where they've had bacon for breakfast stimulates my sense of taste and makes me hungry and ready to go home.

My husband adds a sixth sense, proprioception. That's the sense of the relative position of parts of the body and the effort being employed in movement. This sense is probably more developed in my dancer and athlete brothers and sisters than it is in me. But I'm learning.

Take away one of these senses from our character or our scene and I've got a disabled character or a diminished scene. Or a really good plot device.

Character Building -- An Essay

While I went about my daily business after posting yesterday’s “Briers and Brambles,” I couldn’t get the character out of my mind.

I often write flash fiction to practice some aspect of writing – world building, dialog, scene setting. Rather like an artist does studies of hands or ears or faces.

Yesterday was an exercise in tension building. At least that was the intent. As it turns out, there was the beginning of a character in that piece. A character that I think I’m going to like. At first I thought she’d make a great protagonist for a detective novel. Maybe a whole series of novels. Do I sound like a writer or what?

She was alive in today’s world. But I don’t write in today’s world. I write sci-fi/murder mysteries. I built my world in Murder on Ceres. It’s fully populated with characters I find interesting and satisfying. Dead and Gone is my next novel, currently a work in progress, as they say. It has the same characters in the same world. I didn’t need another character. There’s a new antagonist, but considering what happened to the antagonist in Murder on Ceres, that’s to be expected. 

So I put this woman out of mind. After all, I had important real world activities to perform – dishes to wash, appointments to schedule, an expired auto license plate to renew.

But she wouldn’t go away. So I'm giving her a chance to adjust to my world. She’ll have to move to the Denver Region and to the future where civilization is centered in shiny metal cylinders orbiting Mars. Can she give up her attachment to the Colt 45 Automatic, Model 1911? She’s just old fashioned. But is she too old fashioned?

Any new character sends me back to the basics I learned from William Bernhardt. He writes thrillers and other things. Most importantly for me, he teaches and he’s written The Red Sneaker Writers Book Series. And more particularly, Creating Character: Bringing Your Story to Life. (Available from Amazon. Click here.)

Its Appendix A: Character Detail Sheet is a revelatory exercise. I’ve learned that my new character was born on Earth; her name is Madeleine Denise – a name she hates; she’s generally brown like most people on Earth at this time; she doesn’t suffer fools; and she’s a damn good cop.

Look out Joe and Rafe and Terren. There’s a new character on the block.