GORDON McALPINE: R.I.P.

This is such sad news. Not a lot of details yet, but Edgar nominated author Gordon McAlpine has  passed away at the age of 62. Way too young. McAlpine was such a wonderful talented quirky writer. He wrote as Gordon McAlpine and Owen Fitzstephen. Some of my favorite novels of his: Woman with a Blue Pencil, The Big Man's Daughter, and Hammett Unwritten. He also wrote a trilogy of middle grade novels, The Misadventures of Edgar and Allan Poe, as well as short fiction in journals and anthologies. McAlpine taught at Chapman University in Orange, California, for many years.

How to Write a Four-Footed Sidekick (and other Trade Secrets): Guest post by David Handler

DAVID HANDLER:
HOW TO WRITE A FOUR-FOOTED SIDEKICK (AND OTHER TRADE SECRETS) 

I decided to end my Edgar Award-winning crime series about the novelist turned celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu, in 1997 after eight books. When I did it I was absolutely, totally certain I would never return to them again. As it turns out, I was absolutely, totally wrong. In 2017, Hoagy and Lulu came roaring back into print after a brief 20-year hiatus in THE GIRL WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, returned last year with THE MAN WHO COULDN’T MISS (which has just been named a finalist for the Nero Award), and are now back again with their newest adventure, THE MAN IN THE WHITE LINEN SUIT, which takes place in the high stakes, cut-throat world of New York publishing. It’s a world that I know a bit about. More than I care to, actually. I hate to disillusion you but it can be quite deadly.

I had ended the Hoagy series back in 1997 because I felt that the arrival of the Internet and 24-hour cable news had rendered Hoagy’s specialty -- celebrity memoirs chock full of closely guarded, long suppressed secrets -- utterly obsolete. I can still vividly remember the famous 1985 press conference when a gaunt, haggard Rock Hudson announced to the world that he was dying of AIDs. Rock Hudson had been a major, major Hollywood star for 30 years and yet NO ONE in America knew he was gay. Everyone in Hollywood knew. Everyone in the Hollywood press corps knew. But the film-going public didn’t. They kept secrets in those days. There were gatekeepers. With the arrival of the Internet, the gates were flung open.

And so, I decided, Hoagy and Lulu were history.

And if you’re wondering how I’ve gotten around the arrival of the Internet in these newest books the solution was shockingly simple. I can’t take credit for it because it was my editor’s idea, not mine: They’re period novels. THE MAN IN THE WHITE LINEN SUIT takes place just after Labor Day weekend in 1993.

I wasn’t exactly idle while Hoagy and Lulu were on hiatus. I wrote eleven novels in my Berger-Mitry series, which is set in the small, historic New England coastal village of Dorset that bears a striking resemblance to my own small, historic New England coastal village of Old Lyme. I wrote two novels about Benji Golden, the pint-sized 26-year-old New York City private eye who specializes in finding runaway teens.

I also answered hundreds of e-mails from devoted Hoagy fans who were desperate to know when I was bringing Hoagy back.

Okay, I just lied.

Almost none of those devoted fans wanted to know when I was bringing Hoagy back. They wanted to know when I was bringing Lulu back. Hoagy’s name was almost never mentioned. Practically every e-mail began with the sentence: “I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss Lulu.”

Not Hoagy, the first major new literary voice of the 1980s, with his dapper wardrobe, razor-sharp wit and keen observations. Nope. It was breath-challenged Lulu whom they missed. Lulu, she who dines on 9Lives mackerel for cats. Lulu, whose favorite snack is anchovies, which she prefers straight out of the refrigerator because the oil clings to them better when they’re cold.

I’d always been aware that Lulu was an important element of the Hoagy series. In fact, my first editor, Kate Miciak of Bantam Books, told me flat out back in 1988 that she would never have made me an offer if it hadn’t been for Lulu. Yet I was still genuinely shocked that it wasn’t my handsome, gifted, brilliant hero whom my fans missed most. It was his basset hound, who has a gazillion allergies, snores, hogs the bed, is incredibly stubborn and can really be quite impossible to live with. But after a few years of feeling quite grumpy about the whole thing I decided to embrace it as a compliment. After all, I did create Lulu. And if she connected with readers so strongly then this meant that I’d managed to stumble upon something truly significant about the secret to writing an animal sidekick.

I don’t share this secret very often. So, to you aspiring authors out there, I suggest you get out your notebooks because here it is:

I don’t write Lulu as if she’s a dog.

In fact, I don’t think of her as if she’s a dog at all. I think of her as a full-fledged person who doesn’t talk but happens to possess special powers that Hoagy doesn’t. Her sense of smell, for one. Did you know that basset hounds are the second highest-ranked scent hounds in the dog world? Only bloodhounds have keener noses. That makes her a very useful partner to have around, especially because she’s allergic to a number of perfumes such as Calvin Klein’s Obsession. So if a murder took place in a hotel room last night and Lulu walks in and immediately starts sneezing that means someone who was wearing Obsession was in that room last night. She also has a scent hound’s unerring sense of direction. Never gets lost, which I can’t say is true of Hoagy. She can hear things that Hoagy can’t hear. Plus she possesses that special instinct that all dogs possess. If she likes someone then that means they’re okay. If she takes an instant aversion to someone then that means they’re not.

Hoagy knows well enough to respect her instincts. And he knows well enough to treat her she’s like a person, not a dog. That’s something he and I learned together. He is, after all, an extension of me. And, deep down inside, I’m pleased that fans are fonder of Lulu than they are of Hoagy. I take it as a real compliment to my skills as a writer.

Okay, I just lied again. I’m not pleased at all. I’m jealous as hell. Just don’t tell anyone, okay? They’ll think I’m small-minded.

***
David Handler has written eleven novels about the witty and dapper celebrity ghostwriter Stewart Hoag and his faithful, neurotic basset hound, Lulu, including the Edgar- and American Mystery Award-winning The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald. His other series include the Berger/Mitry franchise and two novels featuring private eye Benji Golden. David was a member of the original writing staff that created the Emmy Award-winning sitcom Kate and Allie, and has continued to write extensively for television and films on both coasts. He lives in a 200-year-old carriage house in Old Lyme, Connecticut. His latest novel is The Man in the White Linen Suit.

Alison Gaylin Guest Post

Alison Gaylin has been nominated for the Edgar three times. She has won the Shamus and RT Reviewers Choice Awards for her books, and has been nominated for the ITW Thriller, Anthony, and Strand Book Awards. IF I DIE TONIGHT (out March, 2018 from William Morrow), her tenth book,  highlights all of Alison Gaylin’s strengths—dynamic characters, family drama, and absorbing plot twists. Gaylin leaves the reader in suspense, tapping into the fears of a small-town community and a parent’s worst nightmares. When a teenage boy is run over during a carjacking involving a former 80’s pop star, suspicion falls on another teen from the neighborhood. Perpetuated by a social media blitzkrieg, roles of hero and villain solidify, but the seemingly open-and-shut police case turns out to be anything but simple. 

Alison Gaylin:

I’m about to type the scariest sentence I’ve ever typed in my life. Ready? Here goes…

My daughter has her driver’s license.

Somehow, she went from tentatively sampling her first spoonful of mashed banana to tooling around town in our Subaru in about ten-seconds flat, and I find that terrifying. I could go on here about the relentlessness of time, about how the speed with which our children grow up illustrates the brevity of life like nothing else. I could quote from Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” or maybe Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” with tears in my eyes, recalling the days – not so long ago – when my little girl held my hand to cross the street.

But none of that quite approaches the mixture of feelings that barraged me after hearing, “Mom, I passed the driver’s test!” Yes, there was that overwhelming sense of nostalgia. But there was something else. Something harder to put a name to.

Thinking about it now, I find myself remembering instead the first time my daughter took the bus to school. We kindergarten parents had all gone with our kids on a trial run – a five-minute, very bumpy ride in the big yellow bus, the main purpose of which was to assure us that nothing had changed since our own kindergarten days – which, in my case, hadn’t been such a great idea. On that trial ride, I remembered how nervous I had been on my first ride to kindergarten, how huge the bus had seemed, how everyone on it had been a stranger, how loud they all were, and how the whole experience had made me want to cry. Waiting with my daughter for the real bus ride, I recalled the sense of dread I’d had at her age, and wished I could go through those doors with her again, if only to protect her from feeling it too. But as ever, my daughter proved to be her own person.

When the big yellow bus showed up, she gave me a quick kiss and bounded up the stairs, clearly ready to tackle this new adventure. What I remember most about that day was the way she’d waved to me from the window – something I know for sure I hadn’t done on my first school bus ride. And it said so much. Here was my five-year-old daughter, riding off to school for the very first time on a noisy bus with a bunch of strangers, the day and year and life ahead of her a story yet to be written. But instead of cowering in the back of the bus like I undoubtedly did, she was smiling, waving at me, yelling, “Bye, Mommy!” Taking the time to let me know there was no need to worry. She’d be fine without me. And she was. She is.

She’ll be fine without me, is a thought I’ve been having a lot these days. Like most other aspects of raising a teenager, the thought is reassuring and melancholy and happy and sad and hopeful and, yes, absolutely, utterly terrifying. Because as proud as I am of the strong, smart, outspoken and kind young woman my husband and I have raised, I still don’t want to let go of that little girl’s hand.

The other day, we got a call from her. It was a Saturday afternoon, and she’d driven to her boyfriend’s house for a brief visit and when I picked up the phone, I was met with a flood of apologies and complaints about the poor signage on his street and panicked assurances that it will never, ever happen again.

Her first parking ticket.

“Mom,” she said. “Mom, what do I do?”

I sighed. She still needs me sometimes. The thought didn’t fill me with happiness. But it didn’t make me sad, either.

Write What You Know or Write to Discover What You Know?: Guest post by Gordon McAlpine

Is it “Write what you know,” or “Write to discover what you know”? Acclaimed author Gordon McAlpine explores this question, drawing from his experience writing the Edgar nominated novel, Woman with a Blue Pencil. 

Gordon McAlpine:
Thanks Flannery O’Connor, Thanks Dad 

All students of writing fiction are familiar with the dictum to “write what you know”; I have always regarded this advice with ambivalence. For some, it provides important license to draw from actual experience, suggesting, not inaccurately, that each of our lives is characterized by meaningful elements that could make for a compelling story. All to the good. However, the flip side to this advice is an implication that one ought to write only what one knows, to ignore or avoid uncharted territory accessible exclusively through the exercise of imagination, often in combination with research to make the imagined feel real. For me, then, a better precept for writing a work of fiction is this simple thought experiment: if I were browsing in a bookstore, what as-yet unwritten book would I wish to come upon to read? This simple ground rule, I believe, incorporates the most valid element of “writing what one knows” -- specifically, the natural impulse toward stories that reflect upon our own lives, whether or not we consciously understand why – without limiting imaginative possibilities My own work has been undertaken under these general guidelines. That is, I’ve begun new stories or novels simply because I wanted to create the precise reading that most interested me at any given time. This provides the act of writing (which consists, day after day, of being alone in a small room) with a sustaining tie to the boundlessness of reading, discovered wondrously as a child and no less powerful now as an adult. Write what one knows? Rather, write the book you’d like to read, which will never exist unless you write it. Simple enough.

Or, perhaps not so simple.

My books have been set in Paris in the ‘20’s, Chicago in the 30’s, Los Angeles in the ‘40’s, New York in the ‘50’s….nonetheless, these books, undertaken as acts of imagination rather than disguised memoir, have all, eventually, revealed themselves to me as autobiographical in sly, unplanned ways. This revelation usually comes about 2/3 through the first draft. This is not to say the books are ever overtly autobiographical. Rather, elements that comment on my own life or the lives of those I know deliver themselves in indirect ways. It turns out, then, that, despite my protestations, perhaps I write “what I know”, after all. Or, at least, what I come to know through the process of writing….

I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor, who said, “I write to discover what I know.”

For me, writing to discover what I know has never been more true than in my latest novel, the Edgar-nominated Woman with a Blue Pencil, which is set in Los Angeles during World War II and the Japanese-American relocation to internment camps, specifically revolving around a young man named Takumi Sato whose dream of publishing a mystery novel is compromised by world events. Such compromise eventually effects not only the young author’s work but also his concept of identity. According to the straightforward dictum, “write what you know”, I would be disqualified from writing this novel, being neither Japanese-American nor 96 years-old, as the character Sato would be today. Fortunately, I used my own bookstore ground rules, as outlined above, for beginning the book. However, about 2/3 of the way through the first draft, I realized that its essence revolved around a question that was unexpectedly personal to me: how to exist when you are “the wrong kind of man”. In the novel, this is characterized by political and racial discrimination. Some reviewers have linked the story to political and racial events in our country today. This, I had planned. What came as a surprise, however, was that the book’s heart had come from my heretofore unrecognized acknowledgement of my recently deceased father’s lifelong, painful, and mistaken sense of being “the wrong kind of man” himself. Thus, I could empathize with the pain, humiliation, anger, shame, and pathos of a young Japanese-American in the 1940’s because I had witnessed, as a child, my father’s heartbreaking sense of dislocation in his world, which had nothing to do with Japanese internment but everything to do with being fully human and generous of heart and yet still feeling like “the wrong kind of man”. Hence, I came to know my late father in a new way by writing about a 22 year-old Japanese-American named Takumi Sato and his fictional experiences between the years 1940-1944.

Write what you know or write to discover what you know? 

I’m with Flannery on this one.

Bryan Gruley Literary Salon, June 12, Berkeley

Join Mystery Readers International NorCal for an evening Literary Salon with Award winning mystery author Bryan Gruley.

Tuesday, June 12, 7 p.m., Berkeley, CA
Space is limited. RSVP for Directions (make a comment below with email address and I'll send directions)

Bryan Gruley is the critically acclaimed author of Starvation Lake: A Mystery, and the sequel, The Hanging Tree. His third Starvation Lake mystery, The Skeleton Box, was just published this week.

Starvation Lake was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America, and won the Anthony, Barry, and Strand awards. The Hanging Tree was a #1 Indie Next pick and was named a Michigan Notable Book for 2011 and a Kirkus Reviews Best Mystery of 2010. It was also nominated for Barry and Anthony awards and has been optioned for a movie by writer-director John Gray.

Reviewers have compared Bryan to novelist Dennis Lehane. Secretly, though, Bryan would love to be compared favorably to Detroit Red Wings stars Johan Franzen and Pavel Datsyuk. He’s been playing hockey since he was a boy growing up in Detroit, and still plays regularly at Johnny’s Ice House in Chicago. Hockey plays a role in the life of the fictional town of Starvation Lake, as do two of Bryan’s other passions, northern Michigan and newspapers.

He and his two brothers and three sisters have spent many weekends at their family cottage on Big Twin Lake in northern lower Michigan—not far from the real Starvation Lake. Bryan had his first newspaper job at the nearby Antrim County News in the summer of 1978.

Bryan is a reporter-at-large for Bloomberg News, writing long-form features for Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. He previously spent nearly sixteen years with The Wall Street Journal, where he shared in the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Pam. They have three grown children, Joel, Kaitlin and Danielle.