That Minotaur Wasn't So Scary

Image from Payton's Dungeon.

Actually, the Beast-in-chief wore a blazer and stylish spectacles. At the MWA NYC monthy chapter meeting this week, I got to converse with writers I know, sit with our own WoM Elaine, and learn some things about St. Martin's Minotaur, part of the Macmillan/St. Martin's mystery fiction behemoth. Their imprint alone puts out about 120 books per year. Andrew Martin (no relation to the saint, but horned god of Minotaur) was there to speak to us, as was executive editor Kelley Ragland, and some other folks who handle editing, administration, publicity (Jessica was sitting next to me), and library sales were scattered around the tables. I didn't hear all the full names often enough to remember with my sieve-like recall. So, forgive me, because I stink as a schmooze hound, and I wasn't avidly collecting cards and networking. I just felt like carousing and soaking up the info with the chicken gravy.

I can accurately report that the Minotaur folks seemed enthusiastic about their work and even more pleasantly, they seem to care a lot about the quality of the manuscripts, cited like a mantra as the sine qua non of getting published. Conveniently, and unlike Providence, it's one part of the process and industry the writer has control over. I also heard the (shocking) advice not to overstretch your marketing efforts online if they're getting in the way of your writing, and that they're willing to see authors build over several books. Immediate blockbusters are not required, though always welcome, of course. All nice to hear, and especially nice for the Minotaur authors present. Given that March 31st has come and gone without a congratulatory phone call, I think I probably did not win the First Crime Novel Contest that Minotaur and MWA co-sponsored this year. So, I'm not in that happy company yet.

Did you get the call? You can tell us. We could seriously rename ourselves the Women of Discretion and also of Mystery, but only after Discretion first. Spill.

The Minotaur guests also didn't much like the talk of "trends" and find it counterproductive to chase them. For what it's worth, if you're an espionage author or foreign author selling U.S. rights, perhaps you're in luck trend-wise. But those categories don't apply to me, so I'd best keep grinding out what I can. It was funny when a writer asked how Minotaur handles touring schedules etc. for their authors with other full-time jobs. The reply was that people have to work out individually what activities will be possible for them, but Minotaur would never decline a good manuscript because an author couldn't tour, and besides, almost all their authors still have day jobs. Welcome to the glamor of crime writing.

They're experimenting with various avenues of online marketing, like many publishers, but it's not clear which strategies are working and the double-investment in traditional approaches as well as the new creates in-house expense and confusion as well as potential. One such new initiative is Moments In Crime, a rotating blog from their huge roster of authors. Andrew Martin said that post-Kindle, e-books did double in sales last year, but that means from tiny number to twice a tiny number. However, audiobooks began like that, too, and have grown to a substantive piece of business today. On the acquisitions side, they deal almost exclusively with agented authors, and it's difficult for a self-published title, even with good sales numbers, to find its way to one of their editors.

If you're an MWA member, in a few days, you'll be able log in and hear the entire Past Meeting as a podcast, but I think those are the high points. If you have other questions about a particular topic of publishing interest I skipped, feel free to ask in the comments. I'll try to remember what was said or make up something that sounds plausible.

Speaking of day jobs: Today, I'm sewing table linens and planning menus and gardening and cleaning for houseguests. Call me Innkeeper. Meanwhile, Elaine is busy, busy with editing deadlines. Laura's manning her trade show booth this weekend. Nan has her own viper's nest of complications to wrestle before Malice Domestic, so I can only hope Terrie and Lois are beaming with pacific contentment somewhere. But I have my doubts. Now that spring is really starting to sproing, it's hauling tail like a lead-footed trucker on white crosses. Hope you're enjoying the breeze in your sails!

Update: In other publishing news, Harper Collins will publish you, but not for money exactly, and retailers can't return surplus. (WSJ article via Roger L. Simon's blog.) But perhaps you'll receive total consciousness on your deathbed, which would be nice.

Link Saturday with Fuzz on Top

We're living in a new place this spring with actual (albeit fractionally slivered) acreage. There's already been some nice landscaping done, but I didn't know whether we had any spring bulbs working. When I asked my long-time, gardening neighbor, she assured me that I could safely wait to see what showed before planting more. Something would happen.

Now, I can really see the daffodils pushing up. No crocuses or snowdrops that I can tell, though other houses already have blooms, but lots of daffodils. Those are the most important to me anyway. The Montauk Daisies are working their magic and sprouting leaves and spreading plantings. The miscanthus grass is starting to green up, but so slowly. The hydrangeas? Dunno. Risky. I think I see buds, but I can't be sure. Some of the recent birds at the feeder are small, even for sparrows, and still carry silly plush mohawks of gray fuzz on their heads and backs. Last night, I made coconut cupcakes to take to my family's for Easter. I love the time of year, and am starting to feel more awake and alive again myself.

My novel's also finally picking up momentum again, even if, at the last meeting of my writers group, no one's life was transformed or even astoundingly improved by reading it. There's still nascent fuzz on it, too, but I believe it's getting pared down, muscled-up, and more aerodynamic by the day. So while I continue plucking the yuck out of my paragraphs, here are some scribbling-related links:

1) Some (I've done it) may give the occasional cat mystery a hard time, but Rita Mae Brown is a fascinating, forthright person as well as a successful author. Though approaches and subgenres may deteriorate into caricature over time, she was one of the founders of the genre and still believes in her characters and concept, so she's earned her pass. Anyway, I enjoyed this Time interview (via CrimeSpot) ...Well, I didn't know I was going to be famous. All that happens, and I was like, what is all this crap? Excuse me for swearing...

2) In a refreshing departure from traditional "literature" or "classics", One Book, One Chicago has chosen a crime fiction title, specifically Chicago-born Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, for its citywide reading program. Coming up in early April, the NEA-sponsored Big Read will also be offering two free events with a noir focus. Panels of MWA authors at Manhattan's Mercantile Library will discuss (and debate, if you're lucky) the lasting influence of The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade.

3) You may love your copy of the terse Elements of Style by Strunk and White , or maybe you prefer the even shorter Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing (however swelled into its hardcover from the original speech delivered at Bouchercon). But neither of these brevities will fit into the waistband of George Orwell's pithiest 6 tips , linked in their entirety. Free sample: Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

4) This TimesOnline article compares contemporaries Albert Camus and Georges Simenon, prolific creator of Inspector Maigret. The existentialist versus the existential hack. I'm sad Paul Theroux used that phrase, because though I don't know what Nan will choose, Existential Hack has always been on my business cards.

5) But Clare, you ask, why are you spending your time on this flapdoodle when you should be writing, writing, writing? Well, procrastination is part of my Method. Besides, I still see blogging as an extracurricular outlet, not a substitute for writing, but plenty of authors have found it worked otherwise to their detriments. Ignore your agent and pals, and do what's right for your writing. (via Whatever) Bestselling fantasy author Robin Hobb strongly cautions against the time and creativity-draining Vampires of the Internet. And yes, you have to read her warning online, smart a**.

Happy Spring!

Guest Blogging

Hi All.

I have been invited to write my first guest blog by James Lincoln Warren and Leigh Lundin and all our friends over at Criminal Brief. Please stop on by and say hello. Otherwise, I'll be soooo lonely.

Nah, actually, I'll be having fun hanging out with the Criminal Briefers. However, if you have never been to Criminal Brief, you are missing a great blog about reading, writing and mysteries.

How many other blogs can brag about having guest bloggers the likes of the late Ed Hoch and the wonderful Jon Breen, and, oh yeah, me.

See ya there.

Terrie

Crime and Books

At this instant, I should be writing my book about crime, well, criminals of a sort. Instead of that odious duty, I'll post here about books and crime. But not the kind that goes inside the covers. I'm still avoiding that.

1) I had to extract and highlight this from Laura's comment to Elaine's last post where she linked the hilarious Book Reporter's Memo to Eliot Spitzer: "If you spent the $4,300 you were alleged to have spent on the night of February 13th on books, you could have bought 172 hardcover books at an average price of $25..." Read it all.

2) A former member of MI5 is under action by Her Majesty's government over his binding confidentiality agreement. The former agent, who has written a 300-page manuscript, "was decorated by the Queen for bravery, was recruited and trained to develop multiple personalities which he used to penetrate criminal and terrorist networks for more than 15 years." The book and methodology sounds fascinating, but will it compromise national security? The High Court is deciding.

3) Seattle's the Stranger has the entertaining scoop-- if it's not your cardiac arrest-- from a bookstore worker about chasing thieves and the top 5 stolen books. Number 5 is any graphic novel. Wait a minute...My peeps don't buy? A strategic career U-turn may be called for.

4) My own book crime. I lifted the two classics above from my 5th grade classroom's lending shelf and could never bring myself to return them. I still can't, ill-gotten gorgeousness that they are.

5) While designed for obsessive text-messagers, this civic scheme works equally well for people like me who used to walk miles with my nose in a book. Britain's Brick Lane has prudently prevented injury and liability and padded its lampposts for distracted pedestrians. No kidding.

A Cozy by Any Other Name . . .

I used to write cozies. No longer. It’s not that I’ve changed what I write. No, what I write has changed names.

That makes me feel better. Knowing this, that is. I thought for a while I had dementia. After all, I’ve been a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America on and off for almost 10 years now, have been reading mysteries since about second grade, and started trying to write them in fourth grade. I should know what the different types of mysteries are.

What I’ve always loved about mysteries is the way average people somehow get caught up in a murder in their hometown or workplace and use their specialized knowledge and ingenuity to solve the crime that the local cops are royally botching. I love the interplay between the characters. I love the puzzle. I love the bad guys being caught in the end and the world being once again set right. These books that I love to read and to write were always defined as cozies to me.

Recently, however, I began hearing that the only cozies that have been selling revolve around talking pets or knitting. I knit, but not well enough to write about it. And no matter how much I try to suspend belief, I just can’t seem to suspend it enough to take a talking cat seriously.

Then a week or two ago, I learned that the definition of cozies has become much narrower. Today, they’re almost always humorous. They generally have a female sleuth. They tend to have pets, and if they don’t, you don’t have a problem imagining shy pets hiding behind all the furniture. And they all have hooks, or gimmicks, whether it’s the sleuth’s profession, hobby, or something else that lends itself to great cover art and promotional items.

Originally, a cozy was a mystery of the type written by Agatha Christie. These are now called traditional mysteries. St. Martin’s Press, in its description of the manuscripts eligible for its Malice Domestic Competition, offers the best description:

1. Murder or another serious crime is at the heart of the story, and emphasis is on the solution rather than the details of the crime.
2. Whatever violence is necessarily involved should be neither excessive nor gratuitously detailed, nor is there to be explicit sex.
3. The crime is an extraordinary event in the lives of the characters.
4. The principal characters are people whom the reader might not like, but would be interested in knowing.
5. The suspects and the victims should know each other.
6. There are a limited number of suspects, each of whom has a credible motive and reasonable opportunity to have committed the crime.
7. The person who solves the crime is the central character.
8. The “detective” is an amateur, or, if a professional (private investigator, police officer) is not hardboiled and is as fully developed as the other characters.
9. The detective may find him or herself in serious peril, but he or she does not get beaten up to any serious extent.
10. All of the cast represent themselves as individuals, rather than large impersonal institutions like a national government, the Mafia, the CIA, etc.

Cozies, therefore, would seem to be a type of traditional mystery. Not all traditional mysteries are cozies, however.

In the end, though, I’m not going to stress over what subgenre my book falls into. Just like so many other things in our world, the list of mystery subgenres will continue to evolve and the definitions of many of the subgenres will continue to change. I’ll just write my book the way it needs to be written and pick the subgenre that best fits it when I’m ready to begin sending it out. And when it’s published, it’ll say “Mystery” on the spine and the back cover, the sales and publicity people will call it a mystery, the bookstores will shelve it in the mystery section, and the reviewers will deem it a “brilliant introduction to a new mystery series.” Only my talking cats and I will know it’s a traditional mystery. Or maybe a cozy again.

Great Bathsheba's Bra, Are We Suddenly Cool?

Whether or not we misanthropic, ink-stained wretches are actually cool, HCC's covers always are. Someday...

If you haven't been following along, the board of Mystery Writers of America has officially tightened its ranks of accepted publishers, and MWA has followed through similarly in the nomination guidelines for the Edgar awards. As a result, editor Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime is not eligible to win for his own novel Songs of Innocence (excerpt at link if you're curious) published by Hard Case under his alias, um, Richard Aleas.

The issue becomes heated precisely because Charles is a very good writer as well as editor, not one of the craptastic dreckmeisters that MWA is trying to shake loose. Mystery fans, a category including most mystery authors, are grateful for the development of Hard Case Crime as a wonderful new venue for hard-boiled fiction. Through it, Ardai's been involved with not only his own work, but reprinting older, forgotten titles and putting out great yet-unseen grimness from masters (some Grand) of the field. To have someone so well-respected shut out of Edgar consideration in the process of ostensibly raising the quality and the legitimacy of the award process is the definition of unintended consequences, but here we are.

If you'd like the essential details, I'd recommend Sarah Weinman's blog post including substantive comments and counterpoints by MWA board member Lee Goldberg and Charles Ardai himself. They stake out their positions clearly, so you may decide where your philosophy leads.

However, this simmering situation reached an entirely new level when I, in my vapid fashion, turned to Page Six, the famous gossip column of the New York Post and found their lengthy blurb on the subject (look for The Case of the Conflicted Imprint) with all the writerly names in customary bold-face and Charles Ardai's picture. Are mystery writers fascinatingly cool now? Can't be. At least I hope not. I can't keep up.

Launched!

The anthology launch was a wild success. Partners & Crime, which is a terrific - and hopefully thriving - independent mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village (44 Greenwich Avenue at the corner of Charles) was full to bursting with friends and well-wishers. The anthologies sold out, and it was heartwarming to see so many terrific writers take pen in hand and sign their names. I think we all had the feeling that this was the first of many such signings.

My negligence lately, in regard to blog posts and comments, is due in large part to a several-week string of techno-disasters, including (but certainly not limited to) a hard-drive crash on a two-month old computer. Makes me wonder what the universe is trying to tell me about my technology day job....

Again, congratulations to all the anthology authors, especially to Nan and Terrie! I'll be away for a bit and plan to report back after Crime Bake.

-Lois

Party Time for Murder!

Celebrate with the New York/Tri-State Sisters in Crime chapter as we launch our anthology MURDER NEW YORK STYLE at Partners & Crime Thursday November 1 from 7-9 pm.

The 21 stories in the anthology are by our members: Cynthia Baxter, Meredith Cole, Fran Bannigan Cox, Peggy Ehrhart, Erica Harth, Marianna Heusler, Nan Higginson, Randy Kandel, Ronnie Klaskin, M.E. Kemp, Chelle Martin, Margaret Mendel, Dorothy Mortman, Terrie Moran, Anita Page, R.M. Peluso, Triss Stein, Deirdre Verne, Pearl Wolf, Elizabeth Zelvin, and Lina Zeldovich.

Partners & Crime is in Greenwich Village at 44 Greenwich Avenue (corner of Charles), Phone: (212) 243-0440.

Half In Love With Death

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
To thy high requiem become a sod.

-- John Keats

Life provides fodder for fiction. If you are sitting in Starbucks having coffee with three friends and there is a writer sitting behind you, you may find yourself--and your friends--in a novel someday. Authors observe life to turn it into fiction. Mystery writers, however, don't just write about life; they write about death. Death is, quite literally, only the beginning. The victim dies and the rest of the book--including any subsequent deaths--are the result of characters' reactions to that death. For our books to be interesting, our characters have to react in ways that are at least believable if not entirely realistic.

The question of realism is a difficult one. How realistic do our readers want us to be? I write traditional mysteries, not thrillers, which means I don't have to do much in the way of describing in (very) gory detail the specifics of a murder. But I do have to relate, with less gore but more detail, how people respond to that murder.

And that's complicated. Because most of us don't have models for such situations. Thank goodness, not too many of us have been touched by violent death, not too many of us have looked at the faces of our friends and relatives in the aftermath of such a tragedy.

This has been on my mind of late because I read a couple of mysteries recently wherein I found the reactions of the victims' friends outside the bounds of belief. They were too casual. People are not casual about death. In fact, if someone appears unaffected, my first instinct is to suspect them of something. So I immediately went back to look at my manuscript to be sure I had not made such a mistake myself.

And what did I find? While my errors were not as gross as those in the books that had driven me to re-examine my own work, I had not been sensitive enough to the emotions of my characters. Too enthralled by the puzzle, I hadn't considered how devastating the death--let alone the murder--of even an enemy can be. Foolishly, I had imagined that the death of someone I disliked would not affect me and therefore I didn't spend time worrying about how it would affect my characters.

So now I have to re-write some scenes, to re-think the development of the mystery. I don't want to write a sob story, but I need to examine more closely the multitude of ways in which my characters might be influenced by a death in their midst.

As anyone who reads my personal blog knows, I saw a man die last week. It was not a violent death, and he was a complete stranger, but even so it made me think about emotions. Not the obvious ones of the people left behind, but those of the bystanders like myself and of the policeman who had to take the man's wife to the hospital. How must he have felt, knowing he was driving a woman to hear the worst news she could imagine? How did the employees who had been working at the Staples where the man died get through the rest of the day? There was a teenager there. Was it her first experience with death?

Obviously a writer cannot go off on too many tangents, describing the emotions of every person touched by an event. Readers would lose interest. But what I've learned is that I need to think a little less linearly--there's more to murder than death. Or more to death than murder.