Bringing BIG Ideas to the Mystery Novel by Les Roberts

Today I welcome back award winning author Les Roberts. Les Roberts is the author of 18 mystery novels featuring Cleveland private eye Milan Jacovich, as well as 11 other books of fiction. The past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writers League, he came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood writing and producing television shows. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio. Les’s newest book is The Ashtabula Hat Trick.  For more information, visit Les’s blog at LesRoberts.com or “like” him on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/authorLesRoberts)

Les Roberts:
Bringing BIG Ideas to the Mystery Novel 

Mystery novels—at least the ones I write—are entertainment. But as I grow older and more experienced, I find my "whodunits" bring forth ideas about very important subjects. At least MY important subjects.

In my latest Milan Jacovich novel, The Ashtabula Hat Trick (it's Milan #18), there are three murders within a short period of time in a very small fictional town in Ashtabula County, and Tobe Blaine is asked to investigate. She brings Milan along for the weekend. But as they go about solving the case, I discuss several things in the real world that bother the hell out of me.

Racism rears its ugly head very early in the novel—something that drives me berserk almost every day! Then, a prison in the plot became very important to me, as so many prisons in our country, once run by the state or the municipalities, are now owned and operated by private companies whose ONLY business is to make money, ergo there goes the smallest shred of decency once given to inmates—especially the non-violent ones. The Ashtabula County prison, originally a very small plot point, became huge as I wrote.

Thirdly comes homophobia. I have many LGBTQ friends, and it enrages me that they face ignorant hatred and ignorance every day of their lives.

I won't stop writing, fictionally, about real things that are hateful and disturbing. I have books dancing in my head that I yearn to write—dealing with dog fighting and with the sex trafficking of children. As long as I can still sit up straight in front of my laptop, my books, especially the Milan Jacovich novels, are going to voice what I think. I hope, though, they'll be suspenseful and entertaining. After all, entertaining is my first job!

Where Are We Now? guest post by Les Roberts

Today I welcome back crime writer Les Roberts. Les Roberts is the author of 17 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich, as well as 11 other books of fiction. The past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writer’s League, he came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio and is a film and literary critic. Roberts’s newest book, Win, Place, or Die, is available at Amazon.com, BN.com and other online retailers, in both print and eBook editions. Les Roberts blogs at: LesRoberts.com. Read a sample chapter here.


LES ROBERTS
Where Are We Now?

Every single piece of fiction, from pre-"Oedipus Rex" to post-"Harry Potter," has to take place somewhere.  Even if the author creates a fictional setting, it has to be real to the reader---to come alive and be vivid and truthful.

All seventeen of my mystery novels featuring Slovenian-American private eye Milan Jacovich are set in and around Cleveland, Ohio.  That's where I've lived for more than two decades; that's the place I know best.

I suppose I could write about somewhere exotic that I've never visited, like Bora Bora or Timbuktu or Sofia, Bulgaria---but then I'd have to create these place from memories of all those films in the 50s and 60s (most of which were filmed in Hollywood anyway) and they just wouldn't FEEL right.

My latest Milan Jacovich novel is Win, Place or Die.  The main setting is a harness racing track in a Cleveland suburb, and I confess that before beginning this book, my only race track experience was visiting one perhaps five times in my life and wagering no more than five bucks on any race.

But for research, my collaborator on this book (first time I've ever collaborated with ANYONE), Dan S. Kennedy, was kind enough to invite me "backside," where customers never go but where the horses are all cared for, trained, fed and very often LOVED by the grooms and trainers who might as well live back there and never stick their noses beyond the barns. I got to travel the long length of the barn with a bag of baby carrots so I could feed each one of the horses, and more importantly, to hug and nuzzle with them.

I was amazed at how feeling and emotional horses are. One of the guys actually laid his huge head on my shoulder and soulfully sighed into my ear, so glad was he to meet someone else who obviously loved him, too.

I also learned a great deal about the mechanics of harness racing, and got to ride around the track several times aboard a "jog cart."  I also talked to many of those whose lives revolve around the animals and the sport. It was an exciting experience, and again, I labored long and hard making the track---both the sections where customers can hang out, eat, socialize, and of course bet, and "backside" which gave me much of the "meat" for the book. 

I find I relate the most to mystery novels painting astonishing pictures of the places being written about.  Nobody knows Boston better than Dennis Lehane. Sara Paretsky is even more comfortable in my birth town, Chicago, than I ever was. Karin Slaughter's works in the suburbs of Atlanta make that area gripping for me. And Lawrence Block OWNS New York City.

My next book, now finished, is NOT about Milan Jacovich, but a sequel to The Strange Death of Father Candy, a book I wrote in 2011 which was set completely in Youngstown, Ohio. The new book is set all over the place (in the late 20th century) in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Muncie Indiana, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, the mountains of North Carolina, the Atlantic Coast of Florida, a jungle town in Costa Rica, and in Saigon. My only regret is that the novel is not long enough for me to make the reader feel comfortably at home in all those places.

Now that the Father Candy book is complete, I'm currently 20,000 words into my NEXT Milan Jacovich novel and I feel once more that, on these pages, this is where I belong---in Cleveland. 

Where do YOU live???

Les Roberts: Cleveland Rocks!

With Bouchercon, the world mystery convention, meeting in Cleveland this year, I thought I'd ask Les Roberts for a guest post.  Les Roberts is the author of 16 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich, as well as 11 other books of fiction.

Les Roberts is the past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writers League. He came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood. Les has been a professional actor, a singer, a jazz musician, and a teacher. In 2003 he received the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio and is a film and literary critic. Roberts’s newest book, Whiskey Island is available at Amazon.com, BN.com and other online retailers, in both print and eBook editions. Les Roberts blogs at: LesRoberts.com

**Win a copy of Whiskey Island by leaving a comment below. 2 winners will be chosen. Be sure and leave your email address (encrypted, if you'd like: john at mac dot com)**

LES ROBERTS: 

The Supporting Cast

When I was five years old and living in a high-rise Chicago apartment building, the manager was very imposing.---tall, good-looking, piercingly deep voice, and always wore bow ties.  By the time I was ten, I learned he wasn't omnipotent, but only a loud-talking phony-baloney jerk.  So when I was creating Bert Loftus, the major supporting character in my newest novel Whiskey Island, this man kept appearing in my imagination, insisting I base a character on him.  Similarly, the greedy landlords in the novel, Jeff and Vicki Ogrin (known not very affectionately as The Ogres), are based, both on appearance and personality, on my lady love's grotesque and obnoxious next-door neighbors.

If I were to thumb through my other 25 novels (and no, I do NOT sit around and re-read them all day long), I would recognize all of the supporting characters, some vital to the plot and some taking up no more than a paragraph, as people I know, people I've met, people I've seen on the street or in a restaurant.  I don't base them on movie actors, which is bizarre and lazy, and I don't make them up out of whole cloth.  Everything we mystery authors put on paper, even fantasy, horror, imagination or sci-fi, comes from something, somewhere, or someone we have experienced. The hired gangster in Whiskey Island, whom I nicknamed "Hatchet-nose," in my mind is just like my memory of a guy in my high school.  Nice guy he was---but even at sixteen years of age he looked like a serial killer.

I've never met Thomas Harris, and I'm fairly certain he never personally became acquainted with an insane cannibal.  But I'd bet the farm that somewhere in his life he knew a brilliant and totally loony genius, and the memory of that genius, under his skilled fingers, fleshed out and made a world-famous fictional villain of Hannibal Lecter.

So think of all those in your life, past or present, who made a lasting impression on you in some way---how they looked, how they talked, how they walked, the clothes they wore.  Let those memories fill you, simmer in your head, allow you (since you're writing fiction) to tinker with them until they're exactly the way you want them to be---and voila!  You're just about ready to write a book!

Now all you need is a plot.....

****
Read a sample from Whiskey Island
http://www.grayco.com/cleveland/books/44109/sample.shtml

Les Roberts: Guest Post & Book Giveaway

Today I welcome Les Roberts, author of the  Milan Jacovich Cleveland mysteries, as guest blogger.  

Book Giveaway: Win a copy of The Cleveland Creep. Leave a comment stating why you'd like to read Les Roberts' latest mystery. Winner (s) will be announced 5/30/11 on this post. Be sure and leave your email address.

5/30/11!! WINNERS: JAN LONG & DAVID BLOUNT !!!

Les Roberts is the author of 15 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich, as well as 9 other books of fiction. The past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writer’s League, he came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood. He has been a professional actor, a singer, a jazz musician, and a teacher. In 2003 he received the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio and is a film and literary critic. Roberts’s newest book, The Cleveland Creep is published by Gray & Company. Roberts can be reached at www.LesRoberts.com

LES ROBERTS:

In my fifteenth in a series about Milan Jacovich, "The Cleveland Creep," notice the Slovenian Cleveland private eye has grown wiser, more mature, and has the same physical problems most senior citizens have. He's started drinking tea, for one thing, and he watches what he eats. Maybe I've actually begun writing a fictionalized autobiography!

When I created Milan in 1987, I made him not quite 40 and a Vietnam vet, divorced, with two boys aged 12 and 7---never dreaming that here I'd be, twenty five years later, still writing about him. Unlike Raymond Chandler telling tales about Philip Marlowe, I began by writing myself into a corner and now I'm stuck with it. I can't avoid the groundwork I laid down in my first effort---so now, yes indeed, Milan has grown older.

Guess what: so have I.

I never took the chances Milan has; I've never been beaten up, shot, or burned with a cigarette, and no one has ever pointed a loaded gun at me. I don't smoke, I don't guzzle Stroh's, and I can't remember the last time I ate a klobasa sandwich for dinner. But yes, I ache when I crawl out of bed in the morning, and you bet your life I can no longer imbibe alcohol like I used to, nor drink an entire pot and a half of coffee every day nor enjoy red meat and potatoes three times a week as in the old days. I don't own Milan's medical problems, but I have plenty of my own; I'm now on a first-name basis with half the people who work at the Cleveland Clinic.

Yet I love my life; I have plenty of excitement and fun and stress like everyone else and will continue until I can no longer sit up straight at a computer. So Milan, who now has life a bit easier because I've supplied him with a young, tough assistant, is enjoying his own life as it moves exorably from one period to another.

Isn't that what we're all doing?