Murder He Wrote
I don’t know why I write detective novels. It’s not for fame or fortune. The first three, under the pseudonym Derek Shields, were released as free eBooks three years ago. Set in Winston Salem they were priced correctly: juvenile first attempts, it’s taken me a couple of years to admit I wrote them! Now I am writing stories set in Australia. These are under my own name. I have sent them to a few friends and family members: let’s say the response has been underwhelming, and that should have stopped me. However, I keep writing, and I decided to make the first three of this series available as eBooks, too; but guess what, no deluge of money has appeared!
Of course, in addition to my attempts to be a good detective novel author, I write this blog, and each week I work away at trying to ensure the grammar is acceptable, the spelling is correct, and the four pages make some kind of sense. Writing a blog really makes you work hard on developing your abilities in written expression. I enjoy the challenge of meeting a self-imposed deadline, ensuring I have the next offering ready by Friday, around 2,500 words. Perhaps my skills are improving, but even if they aren’t, it is enjoyable, although recently I did contemplate abandoning the task, and nearly did so two weeks ago. But writing a novel, that demands a level of skill I don’t possess. Why do I keep trying?
This is what happens. I woke up a few days ago, and there were a few thoughts, about a character, a body, fragments for the beginning of a story. It was enough. I started typing, embarking on the third story in my third and newest series centred around Anthea Daines. Each time I start a new series, I convince myself this is better than the one before. Characters grow on you, and I like Anthea: she’s an ex-drug addict, an artist, desperately avoiding relationships, still struggling to get herself on an even keel, but also smart and thoughtful. I like to think she is sufficiently complicated to make her interesting.
My first thoughts for this new book produced 5,000 words. I have an opening chapter with evidence of a murder, part of a chapter to follow a little later on, and the last page! That seems to be a familiar pattern. I start without knowing where I am going, no idea by whom, why and how someone was killed, but I know something about my characters that helps me see the end of the story, the final section being quite independent of the murder and its solution. By the way, that leaves the other 95,000 words yet to be revealed – even to me!!
I know the real craftspeople of the genre write quite differently. For some, the crime, the complications, the procedures are central, and they work hard on getting all the details right. I read their acknowledgements and I am impressed, and slightly ashamed, when I see all the experts they have consulted. Did they have the basic plot worked out from the outset, then research everything to make the events realistic, true to life? It looks that way as I join the other readers trying to make sense of the clues, the twists and turns of the story, and the obvious (and sometimes not so obvious) red herrings, battling through the details and precise accounts of the process of investigation.
My avid reading of detective novels suggests that there are other authors who slowly slip from concentrating on a demanding story to placing increased emphasis on their characters’ lives. As a series develops, the proportion that focusses on relationships, marriages and breakups, children and their complicated adventures, and even the demands of parents growing older, all that grows.
It makes sense. As I keep stumbling along, so I begin to understand that the characters a writer creates can take on a life that can’t be ignored. I see it with this next book of mine. Right now, not only is the actual murder nothing more than a body by a roadside, but the story of my investigator and her friends is already taking up space in my mind. I am intrigued by the unfolding of lives, as Anthea and her friend Marcella are somehow becoming more real, more solid, and their complexities more intriguing.
Some writers are simply astonishing. P D James’s Adam Dalgleish series sustains an extraordinarily balanced account. Solving a murder, or murders, takes up most of each book: many following that ‘country house murder’ style that is particularly clever: the murder takes place where only a few people could have been the killer, and the challenge is to work out which one. No sneaking in something or someone from left field. All the suspects are there in front of us, and so are most of the clues. We are being challenged to think. Masterly.
Not that P D James doesn’t make us privy to Dalgleish’s thoughts: we see how he is working through the investigation, but we also understand his frustrations and feelings about colleagues, bosses, poetry, and, over time, about the (two) women with whom he falls in love. More than once, we feel like grabbing the telephone, and telling him to sort himself out, but only on matters of the heart: “for heaves sake man, talk to her” (the second woman). In everything else, he is a calm, steely analyst.
While we do know something about the people around him, all that is kept in its place. Each book about solving a mystery, and the slow development of Dalgleish as a person, walled off from emotional entanglements following the death of his first wife in childbirth, which happened decade or so before the series begins, is secondary. Step by step we watch his first attempts to break out of the protective armour he has built around himself, failing the first time, but, painfully, slowly, yet eventually getting it right the second time. What P D James does is to keep all that in its place. Solving murders is first and foremost.
Now I think about it, aren’t the greats of detective fiction all like that? That other giant of the field, Dorothy L Sayers, confronts us with deliciously confusing and complex murders. Her hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, is besotted with Harriet Vane, and he does have a suitably messy set of family and friends. However, it is very clear this is all a minor sideline. Like Wimsey, our interest is in working out “whodunnit”, and we don’t want to be distracted by a whole lot of mushy stuff!
No, that’s unfair. How about Louise Penny, who has created a whole village of characters, and each book extends their stories while also allowing Armand Gamache to solve a murder or two? There is a death to be explained, perhaps some strange activities, but at the same time there are all these intriguing, in some cases quite weird people, who grab our attention. Like many other readers I’m sure, I am particularly fond of Ruth Zardo and her duck, but almost everyone in Three Pines has his or her own foibles and fascinations. In a sense these are novels rather than detective stories, and the books are an unfolding saga in the somewhat claustrophobic environment of small village life. We just need those one or two murders to give Armand Gamache something to do. Not an issue, as it turns out. Despite the size of the village, the murder rate is rather high. It reminds me of the dreaded Midsummer Murders television series, where that little country town loses four of five people every episode!
I am particularly impressed by those detective writers who manage to write a series of novels, and for whom solving a murder is merely part of the story. If Louise Penny is one of those, so is Julia Spencer-Fleming, whose unfolding and dramatic centred around the relationship between the Rev. Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne gripped me from the start. No easy answers in their intertwined lives, and now, like many others, I am waiting for next book, hoping there will be some kind of resolution, but knowing that tidying up their story would be too simple. Very good novelists leave us with the messy realities of life. As of now, I am merely anxious to read the next episode. Come on Julia!
If only I could write like Louise Penny or Julia Spencer-Fleming. If I had started down this path some forty years ago, I might have made a stab at it (I suppose that was something of a pun?). I said that Anthea Daines has been growing on me, but that isn’t quite correct. It is more that she is becoming rather more tangible. Three books in, and I can see her more clearly. The part I am finding more difficult is to describe what I can see, to put the words around the person in my head.
I have noticed that some writers’ characters don’t seem to grow. They remain stuck in the character that was established early on. Much as I like Peter Robinson’s books, Inspector Banks has been unchanged for quite a while. Robinson spends a lot of time drawing on his love of music from the past: he has an enviable recall (or excellent research) on groups, soloists and songs from the golden years of the sixties and seventies. As a result, we observe Banks looking back a lot of the time, almost anchored to a past that is steadily receding from him. Is he stuck in Peter Robinson’s mind, too? Reading his books has made me determined to let Anthea grow and change, make mistakes, lose friendships, keep on ‘becoming’.
One of the ‘great’ detective novelists in the US is Marcia Muller, but I only started reading her books in the last couple of months. The mysteries themselves are excellent, nicely complicated. However, it is Sharon McCone that has me hooked. Each book adds more complexity to her life, changes in her situation continue, and she seems almost restless, wanting to move on to the next case, the next phase in her life, the next stage in her business. I like the way she carries scars and confusions from her past life, combined with her almost unnerving willingness to take on cases she should ignore.
Sharon McCone is a private investigator, a registered PI, and that has many advantages. Anthea is an artist, who gets drawn into solving murders, and so I have to find excuses for her involvement. Even as I write these words, I can see that change is coming. Damnit, I wish I knew what that change should be. And there’s the real problem, I am just a hobbyist, a part-time retired would-be writer. Those whose books I love are from full-time, serious authors, spending time and a considerable amount of hard work to craft a book worth reading.
Do they have fun? I am quite sure John Sandford does, especially in his series with that f**king Virgil Flowers. I smile, and often laugh out loud at Virgil’s appalling behaviour, his sneaky tactics, his attitude to women and his blatant bad language. I know it doesn’t have to be like that. Peter Lovesey also writes books that are fun, with Peter Diamond, a police detective based in Bath, chasing murderers and being led astray by occasional distractions with humour and a reassuring willingness to admit his mistakes and misunderstandings. However, he doesn’t see the need to be either sneaky or coarse. I guess Virgil appeals to the bad side of my character.[i]
Where’s the balance to be found? A complex murder mystery, with plenty of clues, misdirections and confusions. Or an evolving set of characters, who are in the business of solving murders, but also have complicated shifting personal lives. I can come up with plots, but I know I am weak on the people.
While I am happy pointing out my flaws, here’s another one for me to consider. No evidence of sustained hard work, just typing when I feel like it. Some days, the words seem to flow, and on other days I happily distract myself, and go on to blogs, reading my (current) favourite authors, or even reading about current events if I’m really desperate! But once again, that isn’t the whole story. If I am honest, when I am working on the next book, even if I am not writing I can’t get it out of my head. For some of the time, I am replaying words I have written, mulling them over, and deciding that they need more than just a casual edit. At other times, I am thinking about what has just happened, trying to shape where it will go. I can’t let the book go, it is there just about all the time.
Is that true for other writers, or is it more like a business? Does Sara Paretsky find V I Warshawski keeps popping into her mind.? Does she worry about her private investigator’s constant inability to stay out of trouble, surviving explosions, shootings and other horrible events? Or is her mind focussed on sorting out the complexities of the next plot, leaving the gory details of the hunt until the story is largely sorted?
Here’s the other thing. While I am writing and just every so often, usually from out of nowhere, I have an idea. It happened last night. A story that only had a beginning suddenly has a trajectory. I’d had another idea, and suddenly any number of details are taking shape. There I go again, as that sounds somewhat better than the truth of the matter. I should have said I am beginning to get into the mind of my murderer, and even some of the peculiar details of this adventure. Unlike the way I wrote most of my previous detective novels, the overall arc of this story is already in place.
By now I’ve typed some more about murders in Melbourne, but I still have 80,000 words of a first draft to be completed. Have I turned a corner, getting some elements of the overall plot clear at an early stage? We’ll see! Time to stop working on this blog. There’s something going on with Anthea, and I need to address it. On top of that, she’s made a commitment that I think she’s going to regret. A chapter has been forming in my mind, and I want to start typing. Oddly enough, I have a scene I would like to describe, even though I have no clear idea as to where it will fit. Funny hobby to have at this stage of my life. I suppose this is a case of “murder he wrote”.
[i] He’s swearing less, by the way: <http://www.johnsandford.org/swearing.html#06>
