Cartoon of the Day: How to be a Professional Writer

 

A Crime Novelist Steps Back into the Real World: Guest Post by Keith Raffel

Over two decades ago, I turned to writing crime fiction as a way to escape the world as it is. I loved my family and my friends and sometimes my job, but I didn’t much care for real life where violence, poverty, prejudice, and injustice ran rampant. 

What better way to get away from it all than concentrating on the creation of fictional realms, where justice (usually) triumphed and I had (some) control over what happened? I started thinking of myself as a crime fiction novelist following in the footsteps of heroes of my youth like Franklin W. Dixon, Carolyn Keene, and Erle Stanley Gardner. I’ve had five thrillers published, and my agent has the sixth in his hands. 

For years, writing fiction was enough. In the past few years, it hasn’t been.

I lived in this world. I had to face what was going on in real life. I sent off an op-ed to the San Jose Mercury News suggesting the country would be a whole lot better off if only women voted and another to the New Haven Register asking why certain graduates of Harvard and Yale Law Schools sought to undermine democracy. I told the San Francisco Chronicle that Trump acted like a Russian dupe and Harvard Magazine that college students cared more, a lot more, about making money than the state of the world they would live in after graduation. Finally, I collected my scattered writings and sent them to Creators Syndicate, a company that could distribute my essays to newspapers and websites across the country. Bingo! Creators signed me up, and since 2023, I have been writing a weekly column that runs in papers from Maui to San Diego to suburban Washington, D.C.

So nowadays I write a rough draft of the column on Tuesday morning, send a semifinal version to my wife early the next day, and submit it Wednesday afternoon. Without those two days of articulating my concerns and frustrations, of ranting, I’d explode. On the outside, I might look a lot older than I appeared in my 20s, but on the inside I’m an even angrier young man than I was back in those days. 

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned against spitting into the wind. Sometimes it feels as though that's exactly what I'm doing on a weekly basis. My column has not stopped gun deaths, terrorism in the Middle East, government roundups on American streets, or corruption at the highest levels. My column on reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace did not appreciably increase sales of the masterpiece that contains so many gripping passages and life lessons. Still my column lets me vent for 28% of the week, and I can get back to novel-writing, teaching, advising, and doting on my grandkids the other 72%.

An arithmetic miracle comes along with writing that weekly column of around 800 words. At the end of two years or so, there’s enough material for a book. My just-published book of collected columns, The Raffel Ticket: Betting on America, does say a lot about the perpetrators of real-world crimes and near crimes—namely, members of Congress who ignore the Constitution, a would-be king who yearns to follow in the footsteps of George III, terrorists who kill based on religion or nationality, the rich and mighty who value money gotten by any means over peace and justice, and even college students who shun the study of English, history, and philosophy. 

One of the most satisfying elements of writing about the real world has been the support I received from fellow crime novelists. The back cover of my book features a quote from, of all people, Lee Child, whom I have long esteemed not only for his bestselling thrillers, but also for his politics and generosity. When he wrote, “Keith Raffel is someone I really pay attention to—he doesn’t always change my mind, but he always makes me think,” I was gobsmacked, over the moon. 

My own novel with the highest sales, A Fine and Dangerous Season, plays out against the background of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Spoiler alert: The USSR and US do not fire off nuclear weapons, and the world is saved. Despite all, I am betting the real world that has me so verklempt will be saved, too.  

I do have faith. 

Wishing you and yours a 2026 of joy, peace, meaning, and great reads,

Keith Raffel

***

Keith Raffel is a storyteller, historian, and observer of our turbulent times. The author of five published thrillers, he has now turned to nonfiction with The Raffel Ticket: Betting on America, a collection of essays examining justice, politics, education, technology, and books. Lee Child comments Raffel “doesn’t always change my mind, but he always makes me think.” Whether through crime novels or essays, Raffel does invite readers to think harder, laugh louder, and believe in better.

A resident of the Bay Area for decades, he currently spends the fall and spring as a resident scholar at Harvard University.

 

 

Cartoon of the Day: Motivational Speaking

Cultivating that Old Sense of Place: Guest Post by Christopher Deliso

When tinged with travel writing and journalism, the mystery genre feels a lot more familiar—I don’t mean cozier—to me. Probably, this is largely because much of my professional writing background has involved these non-fiction fields during the past twenty-five years. And yet, my readings of classic mystery works since 2021 (when I started writing my first mystery novel) also seems to bear out the idea that from its inception with Edgar Allan Poe, and through all its various divergences since, the genre has been marked fundamentally by aspects of travel writing and journalism, directly but often indirectly.
 
In the following brief summary, I will provide three examples from well-known works where the travel or journalistic aspect can be discerned. In the bigger picture, this cross-pollination of approaches is practically useful to authors today, I believe, specifically for the strengthening of the literary character of a mystery story—in terms of both characters and settings, and the spirit that permeates the tale.
 
That is: the singularity of any given story should have just as much to do with its setting and its people as it does with its ciphers, locked-room ingenuity, or other devices of the genre that could be plotted anywhere. The best mystery (and other) stories are memorable to a large extent because authors succeed in convincing readers that the story happens, of necessity, to the characters involves, and in the places and times in which they are set. The informed articulation of a specific topos and a convincing historicity (even if the story is not ‘historical,’ in the broadest sense) create additional nuance and depth to a mystery story, elevating the most memorable beyond what might otherwise be simply a generic puzzle absent of topical and character necessity.

 
Note: for the reader’s enjoyment, and to better demonstrate the stories discussed here, I will include a special shout-out, in the form of relevant links to recitations by British voice actor Tony Walker of the Classic Detective Stories channel on YouTube.
 
I tested my observation in yet another listening of the genre’s honorary original, and still one of the most remarkable literary detective stories, Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ For both his great puzzle-solver, the Frenchman Dupin, and his native city of 1840s Paris, are so deftly described in passing, in a thousand accidental (yet essential) details that the magic of the piece comes to life. For the eventual explanation of an escaped orangutan with a razor blade to be at all believable, the author must conjure sufficient images of a city in which both the architecture and personalities make it possible. In order for Poe’s city to be fit for the genius of Dupin the occasional detective, it must also be habitable for that hapless Maltese sailor with his strange pet.
 
Further, and most extraordinary, is how Poe manages to encapsulate both the mood of the characters and their location while foreshadowing and mimicking the very concept of the locked-room mystery that he is about to detail, in the early descriptive scene, in which Poe’s narrator first discusses life in Paris with Dupin:
 

“Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen — although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors whomsoever. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone. 

It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamored of the Night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon. The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighting a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams — reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.” 
 
A second story in which sense of place and character struck me, for a different reason, was Dorothy L. Sayers’ ‘Murder at Pentecost.’ This story of mad professors and a murder at an apocryphal Oxonian college not  only reminded me of Oxford (and perhaps, how much has remained the same there over time). Yet it also really emphasized the value that a good narrator can bring in terms of reinforcing character identities through proper reading of dialogue. In the story, Tony Walker does an excellent job of narrating the subtle tonal differences between the aaimless upper-class English undergraduate, the (perhaps) mad professor, and the working-class English policeman on the case. This comprehension of character dialogue through regional accents adds great depth and richness, bringing us closer to Sayers’ original intent and making the story more singular in its new reading.
 
A separate mention of another Classic Detective Stories recitation comes from a book I very much hope to cover in more detail for the Mystery Readers Journal next year. That is the classic 1939 thriller by Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios (published in the US as A Coffin for Dimitrios). The excerpt is called Belgrade 1926

https://christopherdeliso.substack.com/about

, and recounts a fictional espionage trap set in that city in that year. Ambler’s opening contextualization of the contemporaneous geopolitical situation of that era in Europe makes his scenario more believable: that is, how and why ah international mster-spy would attempt to trick a Yugoslav civil servant into selling him, by hook or by crook, a top-secret map of planned mine fields in the Adriatic meant to deter the threat from fascist Italy. The further discussion of the Greek international agent Dimitrios (based on the real-life arms dealer, Basil Zaharoff, and how he attempts to interfere with the map business is recounted in gripping prose, in one of the first realist espionage thrillers.
 
Since 2021, I’ve brought on board the lessons of stories like these into the writing and editing of my own Detective Grigoris novel, which is set in Southeast Europe at the turn of the 21^st century. I’ve applied my own diverse writing and research experience to the novel. At the same time, I’ve observed from the classics of the genre that ‘fleshing out’ a mystery with ekphrasis and richly-local characters are things of long-standing.
 
Such an observation gives me hope not only that my work will be published, but that my approach confirms and complements a pre-existing (if under-discussed) dimension of what makes the mystery genre so interesting for diverse groups of readers.

***

Christopher Deliso is an American author, former long-term contributor to The Economist Intelligence Unit, IHS Jane’s, and co-author of over twenty Lonely Planet travel guides for five Southeast European countries. He has been widely published in major global media, and his first Detective Grigoris story, "The Mystery of the Scavenging Crabs," was published in January 2025 in the Crimeucopia anthology, Hey! Don’t Read That, Read This! (Murderous Ink Press, UK). 

Subscribe to Christopher Deliso’s Substack for occasional articles on literature, history, travel and reviews.

CHANGING HORSES IN MIDSTREAM: Guest Post by Kaye George

Well, not really. This is about changing genres, not horses, but I like that cliché, though I would never want to change to another horse in the water. 
 
But I did change to a new-to-me genre recently. I’ve done several types of writing, essays, literary short stories, murder mysteries (cozy, traditional, humorous, pre-history), horror (just a bit), and a teensy bit of poetry that you really would not want to read. 
 
The reason I switched from literary to mystery, years ago, was two-fold. My literary stories never got published, and the books I read were mostly mystery. It suddenly made sense to start writing the thing I loved to read. That’s worked out really well with 16 of those published and a contract for 3 more. 
 
Then I noticed I was also reading quite a bit of suspense, psychological/suspense/thriller—that sort of thing. And I got the urge to write one. 
 
I hoped it wouldn’t take me ten years to get one published, like it did mysteries, when I started writing that. And, lo and behold it didn’t! It took only two years. Maybe I finally know how to write a book. And not just a mystery book. 
 
To tell the truth, though, psychological (that’s darn hard to type, by the way, you’re welcome) stuff, the way I wrote it, is a lot like mystery. There IS a mystery to solve, just not a murder. 
 
I layered it together: characters, plot, and setting. I have an online friend named Darla and I think that she seeped into my subconscious. I woke up one day and found that I had named my main character her name, Darla Taylor. I used her whole name, too. Darn! BUT, when I asked her if it would be okay to use it, she was beyond gracious. I set up the rest of the characters around her. Some who would be likely to be carrying out the harassment she was getting. She had to have family and friends and co-workers. I also gave her a darling dog, Moose, a big chocolate lab fashioned after Henry, who lives with my son’s family. 
 
Mystery writers like to say we put our sleuths up a tree and then throw rocks at them. This was even better, a chance to put Darla up the tree and throw boulders at her! Bad things! Punctured tires, a brick through her window, evidence that someone had been in her house—lots of stalking and menace and danger. Very fun for this writer!
 
That’s pretty much it for the setup of plot and characters. Now, where to put it. The most threatening weather I’ve been subjected to have been tornadoes. I’ve never been IN one, but I’ve been very close, within a mile a couple of times. The worst one that was nearby was the Xenia tornado, when we lived in Dayton Ohio. 
 
You’ll have to read the book to see how the tornado comes into play. But I use looming weather throughout, storms that are building as, I hope, the tension builds. 
 
I was successful in finding a publisher for it too! That’s why it’s being published by Rowan Prose Publishing on April 15^th, Yeah, I know, that’s tax day. But maybe this distraction will make that day better.
 
It was so fun to step into this genre, or leap into it, midstream, that I might try another one. After I fulfill my three-book mystery contract for Comfy Cat cozies, set in Michigan. A whole ‘nother ballgame. Or horse.

***

Kaye George is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer who has written novels and short stories in several subgenres of mystery. But in April, her 17th book and her first suspense novel, SOMEONE IS
OUT THERE, will be published by Rowan Prose Publishing. Link for the novel: https://books2read.com/u/m27rkG.

You can find out more here: http://kayegeorge.com/
 

The McCone Connection: Operation Raven Nevermore: Guest Post by Andrew McAleer with A Special Postscript from Marcia Muller

One day, I was walking in Afghanistan just minding my own business when I was attacked suddenly from behind. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Marcia Muller’s latest Sharon McCone novel, Circle in the Water triggering the following flashback, I think the incident would’ve remained—nevermore.

As background, let me begin by stating with particularity, that I was on a mission for Uncle Sam by myself, somewhere in country and tasked with getting some stuff and toting said stuff back safely to my detachment’s location where the aforementioned stuff would be disseminated per standard operating procedures. I don’t remember what occasioned me going it alone on this mission, but duty must’ve called. I served as a sergeant with a three-soldier detachment and although this mission had us down two men, even by myself, we’d still be about thirty-three percent strong.

Anyway, there I was plodding along when I saw two Apache helicopters bobbing along in the distant skies. Something must’ve got their knickers in twist because they tilted into a fighting stance and started discharging buckets of rounds. Now distracted from my normally superior sense of situational awareness, I foolishly allowed the enemy to sneak up on me. 

Out of nowhere I heard a quick flutter coming from behind followed by something smacking me on the back of my head. Sharp claws dug into my skin. A big blackbird had swooped down stealthily from the cloud cover and tried to make off with my official U.S. Army issue soft cap—sergeant stripes and all! What kind of barbarous devil bird it was that leapt upon me that day I cannot say with complete certainty. Nevertheless, identifying it as a member of the corvus corax family seems appropriate. The “common raven” for those not keeping up with their bird Latin.  

As a trained soldier sworn to protect Army issue headwear, I resolved not to capitulate to this raiding raven’s treachery and quickly engaged in some close-quarter, hand-to-hand combat with the eerie attacker. It had been a long year and I was looking forward to hanging up my hat, but unlike Captain Ahab, I would do so on my own terms. Hence, the battle waged on and just when I had my enemy on the run, another raven—in a swift move demonstrating a superior knowledge of Napoleonic tactics—flanked the Detachment’s left line with an enfilade of rapid clawing. A few artful hand-chops worthy of anything in Barney Fife’s wheelhouse and I soon emerged the victor over this plucky band of feathers. 

It all happened so fast and even with the fog of war still gripping me all these years later, I remember looking up and seeing the two ravens perched way up high on a naked tree limb. They remained on high-level alert counterattacking with blood curdling caws and squawks, which thanks to my extensive military language studies I was able to interpret. Quoth the ravens, “Take your departure from our patch without further delay.” With my opponents now out of effective pecking range, I was happy to oblige. No bad blood here on my end; we all fought the good battle and presumably, would live to fight another day.         

Outside the wire there can be a strange respect among enemies at times like this. My worthy opponents had legitimate reasons to ponder weak and weary. Some thirty years earlier, the Russians swooped in and deforested eighty-percent of the land. I doubt these two ravens were around to see the destruction of their ancestral homes, but bad blood tends to pass from generation to generation. My present enemies didn’t know a Russki from a Doughboy; they saw an invading hat and reacted accordingly. 

I was a short-timer when the birds got all Alfred Hitchcock on me, and I took this as good a sign it was time to pack-up my rucksack and pop smoke. Home again to a place where everyone gets along and there’s never any fighting. A place where someday you could armchair slump it on a cold, snowy New England afternoon and disappear peacefully into a good murder mystery. Like Marcia Muller’s Circle in the Water.

Then, out of nowhere, Muller’s dogged private detective Sharon McCone tells us she’s been afraid of birds ever since a blackbird once swooped down and grabbed her head. Now I’m reliving Operation Raven Nevermore all over again. But no worries, no midnight dreary—McCone got my back every step of the way.

* * *

Postscript

A Circle in the Water Insight 

from the desk of

Marcia Muller

 

McCone’s fear of birds was inspired by the actual incident she described in Circle in the Water—a bird grabbing her head on her high-school senior class picnic—only in reality, it was my head!  I’ve steered clear of the feathered creatures ever since.

— Marcia Muller

* * *

Andrew McAleer is the Derringer-nominated author of the London-based Private Detective Henry von Stray historical mystery series, created in 1937, by Edgar winner John McAleer during the Golden Age of Detection.  His books include, A Casebook of Crime and the 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists. Mr. McAleer taught classic crime fiction at Boston College and served in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army Historian before returning to public service in the criminal justice system. Instagram: Mcaleermysteries or Henryvonstray

Marcia Muller has written many novels, short stories, essays, and works of criticism. A New York Times best-selling author, she has won six Anthony Awards and a Shamus Award and is also the recipient of the Private Eye Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award (their highest accolade). She lives in Sonoma County, California, with her husband and frequent collaborator, mystery writer Bill Pronzini. Her final novel in the long-running Sharon McCone series, Circle in the Water, was published on April 23, 2024
 

Cartoon of the Day: Behind Every Great Novelist Is...

From the amazing Tom Gauld

 

How A Spark Becomes A Story: Guest Post by Jacqueline Faber

The girl’s face began haunting me months before I started writing about her. I remember the first time she appeared in the foggy, post-dream haze of early morning. I’d just woken up, still dark outside, and there she was, alive in my mind with details so distinct, I felt surely I must know her. Her image came to me on a missing person poster. Long, dark hair parted in the middle. A stare that seemed at once settled and agitated. Young and old beyond her years. Who was she? I didn’t know. I would have to write about her to find out. 
 
Ask any author and they’ll tell you that ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes they lurch into being from dark and dismal headlines. The real world offers up fodder more disturbing than our psyches can conjure. Other times, ideas creep up slowly, pulling themselves into existence as amalgamations of our own histories, memories, and cognitive landscapes. For me, Lucia Vanotti sprang into existence in the form of her absence. A college girl, already missing, her fictional presence asserting itself in the murky no-man’s-land of predawn hours. Lucia arrived with her own demands. Her own story to tell, one that I would unearth from the recesses of my imagination, but that felt like it came from elsewhere. Truly, it did. 
 

In a way, the process of writing the character of Lucia Vanotti, a college girl who disappears from her Southern university campus, felt like excavation. What was she up to in the year before she vanished? Who were her friends? Her enemies? What were the contents of her mind? For me, the writing process began with these questions. I envisioned her at a frat party, hooking up with a boy from class. When she exits his bedroom, she heads downstairs in search of her boyfriend. Her boyfriend! What? He was downstairs the whole time!? How could she? Why would she? Each question demanded an answer. Each answer gave rise to a new question. 
 
Lucia’s story is one half of my thriller, The Department. Her narrative traverses the events that lead to her disappearance. The other half is told through the perspective of Neil Weber, a philosophy professor who becomes obsessed with her after she’s vanished. I felt his story take shape as a counterpoint to hers. He discovers pieces of her past, which he interprets in certain ways. Yet when we witness the events through Lucia’s eyes, they reveal themselves in more complex terms, challenging our facile beliefs that we ever fully understand what it is we are seeing. 
 
Thematically, this novel asks big questions. About loss, what it means to have and to lose. What it means to bear witness. What it means to mourn or to fail at mourning. And above all, how to live with the traumas that demand we simultaneously remember and forget in order to survive. 

***

 
Jacqueline Faber holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and has taught at New York University. Her work explores questions about memory, loss, language, and desire. Steeped in philosophical, psychological, and literary themes, her writing is grounded in studies of character. She lives with her family in Los Angeles. The Department is her debut novel. Connect with Jacqueline online at jacquelinefaber.com and Instagram at @jaxfaber. 

Cartoon of the Day: Behind Every Great Writer

 

How Jeff Got His Scar Tissue: Guest Post by Jeffrey B. Burton

Authors must have thick skin (perhaps scar tissue is a better word). It’s mandatory.
You WILL get rejections, lots and lots of them. I’ve received enough to wallpaper the family room with several left over for the kitchen backsplash. And, if any feedback comes along with said rejections, be sure to thank the editor, incorporate any ideas that make sense, blow off any that don’t add up, and, most of all, don’t lose a wink of sleep.
Easy as pie, huh?
Yup, I know, but sit back a minute, relax, put your feet up, and let me tell you the tale of how Jeff got his scar tissue.
My father was a paperboy when he grew up. He delivered newspapers with a childhood chum by the name of Tom Disch. The two of them shared routes and spent mornings tossing daily papers onto front stoops while making up wild adventure stories, each one taking a turn and leaving the other stuck with a cliffhanger.
Well, Tom took all this storytelling to heart and wound up an award-winning science fiction author and poet who wrote under the name Thomas M. Disch. Although Tom wrote cerebral sci-fi and dystopian novels, he may best be remembered for penning the novella, The Brave Little Toaster, which was made into an animated movie that inspired subsequent sequels.
As a child, I met Tom on a handful of occasions. Whenever he blew through St. Paul, Minnesota, he’d drop by our house to visit my father. So, let’s fast-forward fifteen years. I’m a stone’s throw out of college, working a dead-end job in order to pay the rent and, somehow—I simply can’t imagine how—it came to my attention that dad’s boyhood chum, Thomas M. Disch, was writing book reviews for Playboy. (Hey, I only read the magazine for the articles.)
At the time, I could count the number of short stories I’d written on one finger. But the story was a work of genius, I must admit. I would no doubt be going places. That was fairly obvious for all to see.
Of course, they say the human brain doesn’t fully form or mature until age twenty-five, or, in my case, fifty, but let me lay out my plan.
I would send that brilliant story of mine to Thomas M. Disch, care of Playboy magazine in Chicago. He was my father’s oldest friend; he’d owe it a read. Tom would then recognize my brilliance; he’d be so completely blown away he’d scamper down the hallway to share it with Hugh, who, in turn, would cut me a check for thousands of dollars and, in no time at all, I’d be strolling about Hef’s mansion in my robe and slippers.
So, I mailed my short story off, a month passed by, and, to be honest, I was in my early twenties and so wrapped up with what bar the gang would be meeting at each night, I’d practically forgotten about my scheme when the phone rang.
“Hello,” I answered.
“Is this Jeff Burton?”
The hair on the back of my neck began to rise. “Yes.”
“This is Tom Disch.”
Sadly, that was the high-water mark of our conversation. It slid steadily downhill from there. Passengers on the Titanic had a less grueling stretch. Tom, who’d taught creative writing at the university level, was brutally honest with me. And Tom informed me how he thought my story was, in fact, not brilliant. Actually, it was quite the opposite.
Tom did not like it.
Within a minute of picking up the telephone, my kidneys felt as though they’d been smeared against a cheese grater. Repeatedly. And the realization slowly dawned on me—I’d not be frolicking about Hef’s mansion in my robe and slippers, after all.
“I needed a stiff drink before I called,” Tom informed me with a heavy sigh.
After the call ended, I plucked the story off my desk, read through it a final time, and, yes indeed, Tom was right. It needed a major rewrite or, better yet, a quick intro to a lit match. To make matters worse, dang near every paragraph contained a grammatical error or typo of one kind or another.
I felt one inch tall. I felt I’d need the Jaws of Life to un-cringe myself. And though I was alone in my apartment, I wanted to go hide inside the wall closet in my bedroom, all fetal-positioned up, never to come out. Maybe I’d ascertain if the hanging rod could support my body weight.
It took me several stiff drinks, and several more months, before I shrugged the incident off, returned to my writing chair, and dove back in.
So, whenever I receive a rejection letter or harsh piece of criticism from an editor or publisher, I don’t meltdown and I don’t turtle into myself, because—once upon a time—at the spry age of twenty-two, the book reviewer at Playboy called to tell me I sucked.

***

 Jeffrey B. Burton's latest mystery/thriller, The Second Grave (Severn House), comes out in February of 2025. The Dead Years (Severn House) came out in March of 2024. Burton's critically-acclaimed Mace Reid K-9 mystery series (St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur) include The Finders, The Keepers, and The Lost. For more information, check out his website at www.JeffreyBBurton.com

PARTNERS IN CRIME: Collaborators Continue the Molly Murphy Series by Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles

The last issue of Mystery Readers Journal focused on Partners in Crime. It was a great issue with a variety of articles, reviews, and author essays. Here's a link to the Table of Contents. I thought I'd make more of the essays available to my blog readers, so I'm posting Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles's author essay: Collaborators Continue the Molly Murphy Series.

Want to read the entire issue? It's available as a downloadable PDF.

Collaborators Continue the Molly Murphy Series by Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles

    RHYS BOWEN: Two years ago my daughter Clare came to me with an unexpected proposition. She said, “I think I’d like to write the Molly Murphy series with you.”

I had put that series on hold after book seventeen because I was already writing two books a year, one of them a big historical stand-alone novel that required loads of research. I simply did not have time for a third book. But as Clare pointed out, I got a constant stream of emails saying “when is the next Molly book coming out?”

I was ambivalent about Clare’s suggestion. I knew she was a good writer, but what if she couldn’t get Molly’s voice or the tone of the novels? She was my daughter. I loved her dearly. What if I had to tell her it wasn’t working out? But I agreed to give it a try. I was so pleasantly surprised. I had expected to do a lot of hand-holding to start with, a lot of rewriting, mentoring.

Instead Clare read all seventeen books again then hit the ground running. She got Molly’s voice perfectly, and she came to that first book with so many good ideas.

CLARE BROYLES: I loved the Molly Murphy series from the first book and didn’t want the series to die. I knew that to be successful as a collaborator I had to get Molly’s voice. So I not only read through all seventeen of the novels taking notes, I also listened to the audiobooks. Early on, Rhys gave me some great advice. She suggested that whenever I felt stuck, I picture myself sitting in Molly’s house at her kitchen table while she tells me a story about her life. I try to be the listener as I write, and that it is Molly who drives the story in her own words.

RHYS: We fell into a smooth way of working. We talk through the main theme of the book, we decide on our characters and their names, do the preliminary research, then we work together on the first chapters. After that it’s all rather organic. Clare might tell me she can picture the party scene so she takes it. I read it through, sometimes tweak here and there, and go on ahead. She reads through my scenes and then goes ahead again. We talk every day, bouncing ideas off each other.

CLARE: It is such a gift to have a co-writer. For one thing, I get instant feedback on each scene that I write. Most writers have to just live with their self-doubt! And each time I write ten pages, Rhys has written ten more, so I get to be a reader as well. We spend hours discussing the tricky details of the murder. We want to play fair and give the readers clues, but also have a clever solution. In All That Is Hidden, our latest Molly Murphy, we blithely gave ourselves the challenge of a locked room mystery. And then we had to figure out how the murderer could have done it!

RHYS: Obviously books set in the early 1900s require a lot of research. Clare has turned out to be the queen of research. She reads the New York Times archives for every day we write about and has come up with great ideas that we’ve incorporated into our plots. I come with the background knowledge of having written almost twenty books set in the time and place. I know Molly’s New York intimately, having walked every street when I was writing the first books, as well as having assembled a collection of photographs of the city, restaurant menus, Sears catalog for 1900 etc etc. So when Clare is writing she will leave details of Molly walking across Manhattan and what she might have seen to me. And I leave it to her to find out details about Tammany Hall corruption, the mayor’s election, dirty dealings at the docks.

Clare, tell the readers what brilliant news items you found for our new book, All That Is Hidden.

CLARE: One of the first articles I read was about a boat catching fire on the Hudson. The New York Times gave an exciting account of the boat being engulfed in flames as the crew struggled to dock and couldn’t, then finally made fast at a small dock that promptly burst into flames. Rhys and I knew we had to put Molly on that boat. And that detail shaped a major character. We knew we wanted a wealthy man involved in our mystery, but when we decided to include the boat it led us to the docks and Tammany Hall. I scoured the Times for mentions of Tammany Hall and read about the Republicans teaming up with William Randolph Hearst’s Independence Party to try to take control away from Tammany. Those stories formed the background to the novel.

RHYS: We have just turned in our third book. This one was exceptionally fun to write because we set it in the Catskill mountains at the very beginning of the Jewish bungalow communities. Again I left it to Clare to do the research. She found videos of a train ride through the mountains, old maps and what were the plums, Clare?

CLARE: I learned that the streets of New York were paved with bluestone that came from quarries in the Catskills. In 1907 Portland cement was replacing blue stone and the quarries were in trouble. A new Catskills state park had just been formed with the first Park Rangers, and chestnut trees were still abundant, although the blight was spreading. My favorite find was an artist’s community that was a summer destination for bohemians like our characters Sid and Gus, and for many professional women. It still exists today with lodging and a theater. We decided to make a fictional version for Molly to visit and have the liberal inhabitants come out in protest against the blue stone quarrying that was disturbing the peace of the Catskills.

RHYS: So now we had plenty of conflict. Plenty of potential for clashes and motives for murder. Obviously we are writing about a community that is not our own. We felt this was okay to tackle as it is all seen through Molly’s eyes, the eyes of an outsider. However we wanted to make sure everything about the Jewish community was completely authentic so I enlisted the help of an old friend in New York, who comes from a distinguished Jewish family and we had her go through the book for us. She is a former editor and she went through with a tooth comb! And miraculously she found very little to criticize or change.

CLARE: I don’t think you could write about the Catskills without including the Jewish community. At that time the large resorts had signs saying, “No Hebrews”. It didn’t matter how wealthy or educated the family was. If you are a fan of the Molly books you know that many of them deal with a group who is excluded because of their gender, race or religion. Including, of course, the Irish who arrived in New York to signs that said, “No Irish need apply.” I hope we are able to continue to tell those stories.

RHYS: It is my plan to step back gradually with each book until I can hand the series over to Clare and I’ll lurk in the background as the mentor. So watch out for her. She’s already coming up with brilliant ideas for her own series.

Rhys Bowen was born in Bath, England, but has called California her home for many years. When she’s not writing, she loves to travel, sing, hike, paint, play the Celtic harp, and spoil her grandchildren.

Clare Broyles is a teacher, and music composer whose work for theater won an Arizona Zoni award. She is now a perfect partner in crime.

 

The Thief, The Mapmaker, and The Alaskan Blonde: Guest Post by James T. Bartlett

I first became interested in true crimes that had a mystery element when I learned about Colonel Thomas Blood, who tried to steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London on May 9, 1671.   

The day before Blood, in disguise as a priest, had arrived at the Tower and befriended Talbot Edwards, the keeper of the crown jewels. In those days the jewels were kept in a simple cabinet with metal bars, and visitors could pay the elderly Talbot a small “compensation” to look at them. 

Blood had done this, and also dropped hints about his eligible “nephew”, knowing that Edwards had a marriageable-age daughter. However, on returning with his “nephew” that fateful day, their visit turned violent. Blood and his gang might well have escaped with the crown, scepter and orb if it was not for the sheer chance that they ran into Edwards’s son, a soldier returning home on leave, who raised the alarm.

 

Aside from the pure swashbuckling nature of this scheme, the thing that fascinated me was that Blood, in chains at the very same Tower he’d just tried to rob, asked for – and was granted – an audience with King Charles II. Soon after, the King pardoned Blood and his gang, and Blood went on to become a kind of celebrity criminal. The mystery? What on earth did Blood say or know that won him a pardon, instead of a swift execution?  

 

My next true crime obsession came soon after I moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I found the name Richard Bartlett in Irish history books. The young and inexperienced Bartlett had been sent to Ireland by Queen Elizabeth I around 1601 to draw maps for her invading armies.

 

As a military cartographer he was classified as a spy, so he went disguised a bugle-playing soldier, and there are few references to him in the official records – besides his maps. His anonymity did not last however, and it was reported in 1603 that he had been captured deep in enemy territory and beheaded. The mystery? What was Richard doing alone in Tyrconnell (now Donegal), armed only with his cartographic equipment? 

I thought there was a clue in some of his maps; the later ones included personal touches like people, animals, or – daringly – had used Gaelic nomenclature and even depicted Irish homes set alight by soldiers, all of which were clear violations of protocol. Perhaps he had become disillusioned with his maps, which were being used to seize land and cripple the Spanish allies sailing to the aid of the Irish clans.

 

Both these historical mystery/crimes became screenplays, and the Richard Bartlett one saw my producer and I selected for a residential screenwriting workshop in Ballygally, a small coastal town on the Antrim coast. 

Wendall Thomas, who many of you might know as the author of the Cyd Redondo mysteries, was one of the tutors there, and, after being late for dinner on the final night, I ended up sitting next to her. The rest, appropriately enough, is literally history, but how did a daring thief and a lost cartographer lead me to Alaska?

 

My true crime book The Alaskan Blonde reexamines the murder of Cecil Wells in Fairbanks, Alaska, in October 1953, and focuses on Cecil’s wife, the main suspect in the case and the eponymous “Alaskan Blonde”. 

 

Cecil’s fifth bride, she was 20 years younger than he and notably attractive, ergo the ideal film noir-type suspect for the newspapers and pulp magazines. To them it seemed obvious that she committed the murder alongside her lover, Black musician Johnny Warren, who was indicted alongside her. Alas her story ended in suicide in Hollywood, which is how I found out about it during one of my many expeditions through the LA newspaper archives, while the murder remained a cold case that was never officially solved, nor anyone ever brought to trial. 

 

Intrigued, I started tracking down friends and family, but they all had the same question as me:  What happened? At the time it had been a taboo subject, and now these elderly men and women, great-grandparents some of them, wanted a solution to this 70-year-old mystery.

 

In the final chapter of the book, I bring together all the evidence – the police and FBI files, the interviews and the new evidence – to tell the story of that final fatal day, and so while I may not have brought Colonel Blood or Richard Bartlett to the big screen, I think I managed to solve the true crime mystery of who killed Cecil Wells.

*** 

Originally from London, James T. Bartlett is author of the National Indie Excellence Award winning and Anthony Award-nominated true crime book The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America.

 

As a travel and lifestyle journalist and historian, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, BBC, San Francisco Chronicle, Thrillist, ALTA California, Los Angeles Daily News, National Geographic Traveler, High Life, Hemispheres, Westways, Frommers, Crime Reads, American Way, Atlas Obscura and Real Crime, among others. 

 

You can find out more at www.thealaskanblonde.com

Paaskekrim: Norwegian Easter Crime Wave

I've posted about Paaskekrim before, but with the increased interest in Scandinavian crime,

especially the large number of Scandinavian authors available in English, I'm reposting about Norway's Paaskekrim (Easter Crime)! It takes place Holy Thursday through Easter Monday and is a public holiday in Norway. It's a time when just about everyone in Norway reads crime novels. Bookstore displays are full of detective novels, television and radio stations run crime serials and newspapers publish special literary supplements.

This is a very peculiar national activity. Publishers in Norway actually time series of books known as "Easter-Thrillers"or Påskekrim, and dates of publication are moved to Spring and released at this time when the sale of mysteries goes up 50%. TV stations, radio and newspapers follow suit by running detective series based on the works of famous crime novelists such as Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Simenon and Ruth Rendell. Many of the Norwegian crime series are rerun.

 

Why does Norway choose Easter to delve into crime solving? According to one widely accepted theory, the tradition began in 1923 as the result of a marketing coup. Advertisements that resembled news items were published on the front pages of several newspapers, shocking readers who failed to grasp that it was a publicity stunt. This idea spread like wildfire among other publishing houses, and the crime novel became one of the few forms of entertainment available during the Easter break. Cafes, restaurants and movie theatres were closed during Easter, which was supposed to be a time of introspection and repentance. There was no radio, and of course no television either. But everyone could read, and so the Easter crime novel was born.

Some Norwegian Crime Writers

 

Jorgen Brekke 

Samuel Bjork

Camilla Bruce

Alex Dahl 

K.O. Dahl 

Thomas Enger 

Karin Fossum 

Vigdis Hjorth

Anne Holt 

Jorn Lier Horst 

Unni Lindell 

Jon Michelet 

Jo Nesbo 

Kjersti Sceen 

Gunnar Staalesen 

Agnes Ravatn 

Pernille Rygg 

Linn Ullman 

Great websites about Norwegian crime writers
Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Scandinavian Books
International Noir Fiction
Detectives without Borders
Euro Crime
 
There are 2 Scandinavian issues of Mystery Readers Journal. They're still available. 

Volume 30:4 (Winter 2014-15) Scandinavian Mysteries

Volume 23:3 (Fall 2007)  Scandinavian Mysteries
 

Hardcopy and PDF -- Reviews, articles and Author! Author! essays, many by and about Norwegian crime writers.

Subscribe to Mystery Readers Journal HERE.

The Latent Joy of Writing: Guest Post by Peter Riva

There is something akin to an infection that firmly takes hold of spatial awareness, time, and any desire of possible rewards when you first sit down to write that a story – and like an infection that laid dormant until allowed free reign, once the fever rises, the blank page miraculously fills with squiggles forming into words, buried thoughts and knowledge manifest as signposts, and direction starts to unwind—all to expose purpose, plot, and characters. 

Characters come to life on their own just as purposefully intended, plot which laid dormant, latent in the psyche of the author, uses that precious time of creativity to reveal itself.

Creativity is not deliberate intent, it is a natural force from within. In every person that latency deserves to be manifest, not just harbored as a secret. Art is generosity – sharing with others. Without generosity there can be no impact, no sharing, no sense of accomplishment. That is why authors crave readership figures. Critics think creativity is ego or financial whim. It is not. At the root of every author’s desire to publish is an essential tenet of life as a human: to share, to impart, to give, to contribute.

In over 50 years as a licensing agent I have seen authors struggle, desperate to attain what the media calls recognition, but really what they craved was a wide sharing of their thoughts and words. I have witnessed the sorrow and joys of too many creative people fraught with the necessities and control of the financial structure of publishing – a structure controlled largely by Wall Street’s gambles. I have seen the highs and lows of authors who have achieved enormous success and recognition – many of whom still wonder if it really counted at all, if they actually achieved that creative sharing they were so intent upon.

In every case, authors (and indeed my own exploits as an author) who write for themselves to release that latency of creativity are the happiest, the most fulfilled. An author who feels the release of their own creativity and the catharsis that engenders – these author’s work is always the most interesting.

Take Steig Larson for example: a workaholic journalist – the investigative kind with a stellar press reputation. Between smoking and drinking and his long, long, days probing criminality and corruption, he let his inner self out and wrote – as one volume – a book, all one thousand five hundred pages, closely typed. In the elevator of his apartment building he asked Norstedts’ editor Per Faustino if Per would read “something I’ve written.” Per agreed. The next day Per was handed a plastic bag with all one thousand five hundred pages. Shocked, knowing such a tome would never fit publishing’s business model, Per nevertheless started to read. He could not put it down. As Per told me, asking me to help license it in the USA, the Millenium series was the hardest edit – into three volumes – he had ever accomplished. I asked Per why Steig had written it, “He told me it was burning inside him, he just had to.” The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo’s history is well known although sadly Steig would pass before he could realize its global reach and impact.

And then there is my mother who wanted to write her mother’s biography. Blessed with a remarkable (sometimes eidetic) memory, her mother (as she would later write) knew that Maria would be the only one capable of telling the truthful whole story. Her agent, Swifty Lazaar shopped the biography to Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster, providing there were co-authors. After three years working with them (nice people), Maria rejected their work correctly (as did several other editors at Simon & Schuster as well as Swifty Lazaar). I took over. Maria then allowed herself to release her inner voice on paper and after her sixty pages were submitted, Michael Korda and his boss Dick Snyder realized they were the wrong publishers for what Maria wanted to expose: real events, an in-depth history of a stellar career, and personalities. Vicky Wilson at Knopf snapped it up and urged Maria to “let every scrap of knowledge” flow in what became a truly great biography, revealing one of the greatest proponents of the pre-eminent artform of the twentieth century as well as a great American immigrant, war hero, and singer: Marlene Dietrich. Maria wrote the entire work on yellow legal pads all day and my father typed them after dinner while she slept, presenting the typed pages for editing over breakfast. In November 1990 the manuscript was finished, edited, and locked away at Knopf – a testament to Maria’s latency of creativity and accurate memory. 

Never once did Steig Larsson ask Per Faustino how much money he would make. Per told me all Steig ever wanted to know was how many languages his work would reach, how many people. Similarly, never once did Maria ever ask how much money the book would make in 13 languages but how many people would learn, understand, what made this life of a great performer possible. How many would heed the messages of that life? At a coffee bar at Hamburg airport a server refused to allow Maria to pay for her coffee before boarding a flight. The woman was crying, thanking Maria for sharing secrets that had affected her own life in a similar way, “If you can tell everyone of the rape, then I can too, and maybe people will understand.” Better than any “best seller” listing, such moments are what drove Maria’s inner desire and rewarded her effort.

Latent creativity always has a purpose, is always dying to get out. The very best of authors delve into their own psyche and experiences and share them with whoever is lucky enough to pick up the book. Allowing the escape of latent thoughts and experiences is always a satisfying luxury and often cathartic. Such output is simply generosity and that is a true manifest artform.

***

50+ years as an agent, Peter Riva created and produced of over 78 hours of primetime wildlife television, having spent a ton of time in East Africa and parts of North and Central Africa. Author of over nine books, five of them thrillers taking place in East Africa. Born and raised in New York City, London, and Switzerland, he moved some years ago to the wilds of Gila, New Mexico.